Urbit & NEAR's Pioneering Partnership w/ Ted Blackman & Illia Polosukhin

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   welcome back everybody hope everybody's well uh thank you all for being here uh and joining us for another Ilia series Twitter spaces and podcast we're switching up the format a little bit so I expect to see some podcast format uh videos on YouTube uh to to be able to watch them after today we're joined by two amazing people uh Ilia co-founder of near as well as Theodore Blackman CTO of

2. 0:23

   urbit foundation um today's Twitter spaces is uh all about the uh near and herbit partnership what exciting things are in the pipelines what this partnership is going to lead to uh anything exciting on uh the herbit side as well um a lot of amazing developments uh to kind of look forward to and without further Ado I will go ahead and let the speakers introduce themselves and uh get into the topics today and uh

3. 0:47

   just on that note we will try to actually um open up the floor at the end uh actually for Q&A as usual so if you have any questions throughout uh save them for the end and we'll try to get to you um but yeah Theodore over to you all right hello thanks for having me uh yeah my name's Ted Blackman I'm uh CTO of herbit foundation and um I've been working on herbit for six and a half

4. 1:10

   years most of which as a core developer and I've been managing people last couple years and before that I had a a pretty normal career in startups uh for a while I've been doing that for a long time um and um yeah and we've been uh working with near now for um over six months right and um the uh I've talked to El a few times and it's been it's always so I'm excited to be here hello Ted yeah awesome to have you here I'm Ilia co-founder of near it's great to have this uh new episode and

5. 1:59

   having Tad and kind of urban joining us so uh let's kick it off uh I guess to start let's introduce herbit uh to the audience so herbit is a personal server and it's a network of those personal servers it's a peer-to-peer Network um and the idea of herbit is really that Computing should be done better um from all the bottom layers all the way through the top um and so that goes all the way down to machine code programming language operating system Network protocol identity system all that is inside of urban it's all done in

6. 2:41

   a very unusual way that's designed to be timeless and it's designed to be modern uh so it's you know the the current Internet stack that we use was built on you know 50-year-old technology and a lot of the problems that we think of as social problems on the internet things with um you know ads and censorship and just a you know some lack of composability of applications you can

7. 3:04

   trace the origins of those uh back to technical limitations of the underlying protocols this is 's core thesis and so we're trying to do it right and we're trying to do it way you do it right sort of uh in a way that continues to be right as Hardware changes and as the way that people use computers evolve and so a big piece of that is that each person should have their own full computer that's a server meaning other people can

8. 3:31

   find that computer and send requests to it and it can send responses back um and you know your laptop is actually not like this your phone is not like this they're clients they're not servers um and so uh with herbit the idea is that each person should be running an operating system that acts as a server and then these servers can be peers of each other and so they can all communicate in peer-to-peer networks and you can have almost all the major

9. 3:55

   applications that we use these days could be replaced by decentral ized Alternatives um where you don't have to have some Central server somewhere that is either serving you ads or that you have to pay in order to use the service um and so and we think that that will lead to a um a better world a more humane way of using Computing and it it dub Tails very well with uh you know

10. 4:19

    what Elia has described as the open web concept uh so urbit itself is not exactly a crypto project the ownership of herbit network addresses is registered on a blockchain um but other than that it itself is not a blockchain uh and is very much not a traditional crypto project in a lot of ways however because it's building that you know building toward that same world uh a lot of our users are crypto people

11. 4:43

    and a lot of the you know relationships we have with other organizations and the use cases we see for that are crypto related um and so near is the the flagship integration we have uh with with sort of the rest of the crypto world awesome thanks thanks for introducing and yeah you touched on the open web I think it it's worse kind of expanding on this uh because indeed kind of we've been talking about this I think like since 2019 really trying to bring back some of

12. 5:17

    the concepts where um the internet was built on open permissionless protocols and everybody was uh kind of building this big you know permissionless network uh early on you know in and uh connecting to everyone right and like early on actually everybody kind of had a server as well um and as as they were connecting in you know early versions of email server like you know you would run your own email server you would run your own uh FTP server you would run your own other uh kind of

13. 5:56

    interactions and then you know we had this kind of massive centralization power that happened as web 2 introduced this platforms which had Network effects through content through data and interactions that users put into them that then by the virtue of having uh kind of it all in one place me men displays became more and more interesting and people wanted to join and kind of uh becoming participants versus becoming

14. 6:27

    part kind of part like becoming users of the Ser like of specific service versus being participants in the protocols and web 3 is trying to turn this around kind of conceptually and this is where I do like to use you know web3 open web instead of crypto because crypto I think is a primitive it's a financial and kind of um economic primitive uh that enables blockchains but web3 is why broader uh space that allows to connect a lot of different

15. 7:00

    Technologies into this new self- Sovereign way of of doing things now one important moment to not to note is um similarly how you know when protocols were designed you know everybody has their own server you had their own email uh kind of server then you know you have Gmail and hot mails and Yahoo you can interconnect them and you can send emails between them and I think one of the things we

16. 7:29

    are seeing right now which uh kind of is happening that like it's actually pretty complicated to connect this different networks that have been built in web 3 and so one of the things that we as near trying to do and why it's excited to partner with herbit but also with whole host of other web3 projects is to really interconnect all those back and really create this we call it chain abstraction

17. 7:52

    kind of a unified way of interacting with the whole web3 Space so maybe on this note would be uh kind of worse diving in into um how do how do developers and users right now can interact with zbit and uh as well maybe we can discuss the interesting ways kind of how near decentralized front ends as well as other parts of Stack can be fitting into this yeah so in terms of how to get onto

18. 8:24

    herbit um there are a few ways um so ton and and red horizon both have hosting products so that allows you to get on in just a few clicks very easily and um and then you can have your own what's called an urbit Planet uh which is an urbit node um and then once you have that then you can interact with it uh from your phone and through a web web browser uh both and so I have an urbit app on my phone um that's what I mostly use to interact with urbit and sometimes I use

19. 8:56

    the the web app on my laptop um and the thing is that that's uh you know it's interacting with just my urbit right so my clients are just talking to my urbit not anybody else's so it's really sort of my little cloud my little piece of the cloud um and uh and then in terms of if you're a developer uh it's pretty easy to get uh spun up to uh to write an urbit application and then Distributing the application to users is as easy as just having it having that code live in your urbit and you run a command to say make

20. 9:29

    it public um and then uh anyone on nurb it can download your application you can post links to it uh and there's a so there's something that looks and feels like an app store but it's fully decentralized on herbit and so that's uh it's very easy to uh to make and distribute an urbit application uh and that application will run on the back end those R it will run on everyone's servers um and then um the there's also you know typically when you write an herbit app uh there's also a

21. 9:59

    client side component so there's you know the of you know the web app that runs in uh you know the client side of the web app that runs in a web browser or on a phone and uh so you do have to write that yourself right as if you're writing a normal you know Web Two uh web app and you can do it the same way um and you can distribute that code along with uh the backend code uh and

22. 10:22

    then uh something that we're working on with nearer is actually um uh making it so that you could also have that code be uh distributed by you know putting it onto the near chain uh and then using near as boss system their blockchain operating system uh to distribute the code from the chain which has some you know some nice security properties um things yeah I think the kind of one of the things that really

23. 10:58

    uh like increase the interest in this was this idea that I as a user you know want to have some private data that lives somewhere you know if I lose my phone I don't want to lose all my private data as well and at same time you know making it possible to interconnect with other uh you know through applications with other with other people with other communities and at the same time like l in this still back in into all of the

24. 11:30

    rest of the web 3 space which we have kind of web 3 you know blockchains are more about public kind of shared uh information right be that you know balances or uh you know social like with social or other parts right that's more about like public shared data and herit really offers this kind of private or Community scoped uh data as well and so joining this kind of two different functionality right under one roof under

25. 12:00

    one set of you know ways of building front ends and applications is really powerful because now it allows you to have like self- sovereignty across kind of a variety of different uh forms of um kind of storing and interacting with kind of backend and data data stored there and so like for me I think that maybe worse discussing is like what are the cool applications and use cases that you already see on herbit but also how we can maybe marry more with web 3 with blockchain with

26. 12:34

    kind of crypto economics that you know maybe give some ideas to people what they can build uh in in the coming months yeah I was actually talking to uh Thomas is the deputy director of urba foundation earlier today and we were just discussing that one thing that I don't know if we're going to build it at UF or try to get somebody else to build it but um um you know ideally incept

27. 13:00

    some you know startup founder into doing it um but the uh one thing that would be really great to see would be a podcast player on Urban right and so it would feel sort of like maybe Spotify or apple podcasts or patreon something like that um but fully decentralized um and uh then the way it would work is I use you could have a browser client for it or a phone app um and the back end wouldn't have to do very much it would just store sort of how far you you know

28. 13:34

    what the files are that you're listening to or watching and how far along you are in those at least the basic version of that so that would be pretty easy thing to build which is part of why it's exciting and then the next thing that would make it exciting is if you made it so that you could use crypto to subscribe to some content right so maybe pay five bucks a month um to you know to get the latest episodes or something

29. 13:59

    podcast and uh or the latest blog posts you could do the same thing with a you know text um and something interesting there is that it's not that easy to do subscriptions with crypto as it is right you really need some piece of code that's running on your behalf somewhere that keeps running and then once a month you know sends another five bucks uh to keep the thing online right and so uh

30. 14:25

    since your herbit is running all the time it's a server and you can control it this is something your herbit could do for you very easily you could have a little hot wallet uh you know in an app on your herbit and then that could just keep keep all of your you know media subscriptions open um right and uh and then have a nice a nice user experience where you don't have to think about that you don't have to open something up and you know dig out your Hardware wallet um

31. 14:49

    you know every every two weeks or whatever um just to just to listen to the you know your latest Mr Beast episode yeah I mean that's a really interesting idea to um use zbit pretty much as your kind of crown job for your onchain activity right and you can expand it beyond that you know to a full like if this and that than that where you're pretty much like hey you know if if this

32. 15:20

    happens like if you know if it rains and you know send $5 to this or you know unscribe from that yeah well I mean trading bot is like the epiy of that but probably like for more kind of user level experience things right you can just like Define rules you know be that like do this monthly or uh do that yeah that's an interesting idea and kind of yeah on top of that you can build other uh different applications I think the the other interesting part as well is yeah like

33. 15:53

    using pretty much uh potentially the herbit as a way to kind of proxy for decrypting some of the data that let's say the podcast itself content is encrypted but you're getting provision the key that you know authorized to decrypt it and so you have like a proxy encryption kind of scheme that's happening um so there's like interesting ways to kind of engage you know what our servers to do more additional work to really create like end to end uh kind of encryption and

34. 16:25

    permissioning system yeah that is interesting the um yeah we're working on a system right now that is a little simpler than proxy re-encryption but uh would let um you would let a um one urbit ideally that even something that's just on your laptop to be able to publish content to a large group of people and that is encrypted um publish it efficiently um and then ideally sort of elastically scale up to be like a Content delivery

35. 16:55

    Network through Orbit's relay system right so we have these super nodes called stars and galaxies and that really should facilitate something where like well I'm I'm an individual I'm publishing something on my laptop um but then if a lot of people start asking for it then there's a relay in the cloud that people are asking they're asking through that relay to get to me and so if the Relay can cash that content uh then you know the requests don't have to

36. 17:20

    come all the way to my laptop and my personal you know small internet connection which you know crapped out earlier in this call already um and the uh and then you know it could be served from a big data center um so that's a lot of what we think about too is like how can when you make it so that you know as an individual it could still feel like when you're running herbit it could still feel like you have all the

37. 17:43

    cloud at your disposal right um and because I think there's a there's something there where you there's a there's a flip side of sort of giving everyone like giving individuals like control you know and freedom over their computer in data which is that once you have control you also bear the responsibility for it um right and it's you really feel this when you have when you own crypto right and

38. 18:08

    then you know if you own it with your Hardware wallet it's like or you know any kind of private key if you lose it it's just gone right there's nobody you can go to and say hey please please give it back to me um right so that's sort of an extreme example but even when it just comes to you know your computational resources like if you wanted to publish something um or if you wanted to publish on a website like you better use some sort of system to distribute that

39. 18:30

    throughout the whole Cloud right a Content delivery Network um and um yeah so the um yes so this is something we think about with herbage trying to make sure that it you know this stuff scales up sort of seamlessly uh when you know an individual gets you popular I guess like what is a financial incentive for planet and star for star in Galaxy to pretty much cash and not direct the you'd pay them for it yeah and maybe they charge you more that month if you

40. 19:02

    you know if you get a lot of hits right either that or they say Hey you need a Premium plan if you want to if you want to get you know so you have to pay you know whatever 25 bucks a month instead of 10 bucks a month is there urbit plus yeah herbit Deluxe herbit Royale you know yeah herbit premium yeah um yeah I mean I think this is generally the point you touched on though is is really important is kind of the basic Primitives are of self- sovereignty like

41. 19:33

    kind of leave the user at at a at a disadvantage to to a level that they need to now care about everything that's happening right and and understand in pretty deep level right or they get you know scammed or lose their assets or data and so I think on the product side figuring out how to make it simpler and more straightforward to not worry about that right a lot of of like investment we made early on was making our account model such that you can have multiple Keys you can have you know potentially a

42. 20:06

    recovery system that you know relies on your social connections or even on trusted parties who have kind of specific rules when they can recover your account such that even if you lost your kind of primary key you can still have access and so I think like the more systems like that are really important um both on kind of access and uh ownership but also on data compute resources to really uh hide the complexity of this

43. 20:38

    technology while providing experience it's ideally better than what is currently uh possible InTune yeah yeah we think about this a lot in herbet that you know either uh you know for herbet to sort of be something that people care about it either has to do something that nothing else can do for them um or it has to do something that something else can do but so much better than that it's worth switching

44. 21:01

    right and the you know the Privacy benefits the sovereignty benefits all those things are real um but they're very rarely you know enough from a product perspective to get somebody to switch using switch from using something else uh and a lot of what we think about with regards to this is what we call zero click maintenance so once you have your herbit up and running it needs to keep itself running right as opposed to

45. 21:25

    trying to run your sort of typical Linux or um that's running a lot of applications on there like those things usually require a lot of a lot of updates a lot of upkeep you have system administration tasks and there's a lot of you have to know a lot and be willing to spend a lot of time and you know fix a lot of problems in order to keep those things running they're very much intended for

46. 21:44

    industrial use not personal use right and this is why you know we have to say personal server and not just server right um because if because if we go tell people like okay just go run a server and then they run a away screaming um if they even know what it means um and the and they should right um they should run away screaming nobody should have to do this it's it's cruel and unusual um so yeah that's a that's a lot

47. 22:08

    of what we put some put effort into is making sure that urbit stays running keeps itself up to dat uh it has a lot a lot of user control over you know which apps need to stay running if it updates you know right if if some of the apps update but the system doesn't and you know we've we've actually kind of built out a fair amount of uh fair amount of structure for make for you decentralized app updates and app migration um that I

48. 22:33

    think is we should probably write about it at some point actually because I don't think anybody else has really explored um those you know lines of thought and they're they're pretty important when you actually have a decentralized network and people are um you know running different versions of a chat app and different versions of an operating system different versions of network protocol and keeping all that stuff running when there's no you can't just shut down the server and update

49. 22:57

    everybody bring it all back up right because decentralized yeah I think I mean this is actually a very interesting um question because I mean back back in the day then before like outo updaters became like a really Pro like predominant thing right people would keep the old Cent like old clients for a long time until they like completely start breaking because like of some breaking changes um

50. 23:28

    yeah and yeah I think it's it's it's it's even worse for kind of server level uh software because yeah the updates coming out and kind of you expect it to keep it keep it up to date uh pretty pretty I think for me the the interesting thing I always found kind of in the like the blockchain as a tool has been a very useful for this kind of continuous protocol innovation right so the example I like is ipv4 right so the

51. 24:02

    IP addressing from tcpip stack that's a very old technology IPv6 was designed in end like end of 90s if I remember correctly it was standardized and accepted like in beginning of 2000s and we're still not on it I'm like pretty sure my computer still on on the ip4 right now yeah I think it's about 20% of the of routers support at something like that which is not enough to really use it yeah it's not enough but even if like if your router supports

52. 24:34

    it and your computer supports it it's still not like automatically like up upgrades into it right and so what what's interesting about kind of blockchain is is like you can actually achieve this Global consensus about that like everybody's ready to upgrade and like or majority is ready to upgrade and now kind of it is happening this is a user activated soft Fork right yeah and so so near actually would build that in

53. 24:57

    direct directly into protocol that as new versions get released the validators vote kind of as part of consensus that they want to upgrade to a new version and then when there's kind of a super majority voted in there's like a automatic like with delay upgrade that happens um and so you need to maintain the one version before so all validators can run previous version uh to be able

54. 25:21

    to kind of particip as you update the software participate in the current consensus but itow to have like this rolling upgrades and I think we had like over 40 upgrades since main net uh because of this but I think like that that kind of one of the concept that indeed like it's it's a hard software engineering problem the VB 2 solved it in two ways one is everything everybody uses my servers and I upgraded and I have a huge devops team

55. 25:51

    that actually does that because it's a lot of pain and there's like cicd Etc but like it's still a lot of pain I like I worked at Google like one of the products had like and not the biggest product had you know a 12 people team they were launching they were launching an upgrade and it was like a whole week of work for them to just upgrade that like and it was part of the back end of part of the service right it's not like in the whole thing and I'm

56. 26:17

    like shouldn't this be like automatic like build a software launch it um but you know there's a lot of things that go into it and then on the client side right like I you know every time you open your laptop it asks you to upgrade something uh you know every time you launch a zoom it's trying to upgrade itself so and like you don't even know what's happening like what what code runs on your on your laptop anymore

57. 26:41

    because it just like pushes the binaries to you all the time so I think like yeah having a better systems for this are important having a way to track what software you runs who certified it potentially you know what are the ways to authenticate that um it's not like malicious software and I think also one thing that I'm really looking forward is like having a audit registry and kind of like Bounty registry on chain where people can actually like report that like hey we reviewed this piece of software and it's

58. 27:14

    like you know this is our kind of certification and it doesn't need to be like public from the start but you know they can commit to a hash and review it later uh and same for for bug reports and like critical issue well reports like right now you can I can commit to to a vulnerability on chain and so everybody who uses this software will receive that there is a vulnerability and like its criticality level and then I can reveal it later when it's already patched uh and so this would allow to

59. 27:46

    like you know potentially I reveal some information for people to like stay safe but not reveal the way to actually exploited um but this now create can create a more transparent Marketplace for for this where people receive back boundaries for this people actually who are you know very security critical can you know maybe not use the software not use the smart contract not use this wallet or whatever in the meantime Etc

60. 28:11

    right like what's the what's the reason to pre-commit to the vulnerability like to put the hash in there uh well to to two things why well I mean it's it's it works as like economic incentive right is you you pre-commit to it so you re you will receive some pay out if it's true and you will lose your B like your kind of whatever the oh you have to put up some stake in order to do this like B bond to you will lose yeah I see interesting but I mean part of it is

61. 28:40

    also so in blockchain space specifically because smart contracts are you don't have an owner normally I mean like not normally but you know there's many smart contracts that don't have an owner right somebody just deployed a smart contract and now it's there so now imagine there's a vulnerability in the smart contract contract so the best way to you know like there's nobody to tell that there's vulnerability except to the users of the

62. 29:06

    smart contract so what you need to do you need to inform everyone that this is a problem so that people withdraw money but without revealing what's the problem is but yeah if you don't have any bond right people will spam the like you can just Spam it and deny like you know service so you need some form of right both reputation and economics yeah and I guess you need some governance there too right because you have to have some group of people who's responsible for evaluating the claim and saying yeah that was actually a

63. 29:35

    vulnerability yeah well this is where like whoever runs kind of the bug Bounty or whatever the payout system right but presumably like for for a blockchain makes sense for like a governance or whatever have some amount of you know funds allocated for security and so it's a public good security funding and so like the allocate yeah that's an interesting uh kind of organizational structure for it too right like that if you have decentralized software you need to have like a

64. 30:08

    decentralized you know Security Management as well because there's nowhere to send an email to say like hey there's an issue here yeah this was like I think that there was this story where there was a contract that had a vulnerability but then I don't know like 600 other people forked it and launched it on like and then people are like we found a vulnerability but it's like we don't

65. 30:31

    even know who to tell about because it's like so prominent right so um yeah yeah so yeah it's interesting that's sort of it reminds me of a lot of the other stuff that you guys are doing at near actually right I was taking okay well now that these decentralized systems are being used and what other kind of niceties you know and other features need to be added to them to make them

66. 30:56

    sort of fully fully featured fully production level and have the same kind of you know level of um not just like sort of you know cryptographic security or sort of security in a hard sense but like the sense of security you know psychological security that you have from a web 2 system as a user um knowing that it works knowing it's easy to use knowing that you'll be able to do stuff that there's some sort of recourse if something goes wrong yeah I mean there's like you know foolproofing is is literally a technical

67. 31:27

    term so uh it's not it's not supposed to be like you know um pointing at anyone specifically but it's just a general thing like I think every even however technical people we've all done some like something stupid that we shouldn't have with software like I've I've deleted uh my hard drive once completely and without backup when installing Linux so let him who has not rm- RF cast the first stone

68. 31:58

    yeah exactly so so there there's like the like H having you know protections for the users that are undoable like there's ways to say like I know what I'm doing I want to like Nuke my hard drive but you know making sure like hey what you're doing right now is like planning to installating system on a drive that has a lot of data maybe you shouldn't right uh is important so I think like that's that's you know that's a Polish we really missing and and it's clearly

69. 32:28

    showing if you see like people getting hacked left and right with like you know not even that sophisticated uh systems but uh indeed like this is the flip side right now of s sovereignty that we need to address to really move this space forward yeah well and I mean one of those I mean this this is a could be a good segue into boss right because you one of the uh one of the places where users do get their money

70. 32:59

    stolen is uh by either going to the wrong you know by just going trying to go to some website for a Dap and either the you know either that dap itself is malicious or there's you know somehow the um the DNS gets spoofed right and you end up going to you know instead of downloading the the website that you think you're downloading that that should be coming from that URL you actually get some attacker's website uh and you're you know your metamask gets drained and you're never right like and

71. 33:31

    so there's you know part of the way to part of you know part of an approach for dealing with this is to make sure that there's um the uh what they call software supply chain security right where it's like okay I'm getting this software I want to run the software in my browser in in a browser tab where is that software coming from right so there's a supply chain of how that software got into my browser and you need to secure that whole chain so that

72. 33:56

    somebody some attacker can't sort of jump in at one of the links of the chain and swap out you know the code that's supposed to be running with something that just you know sends all the money to them right um and so one big piece of this um is to actually get the code from a blockchain uh where it's been signed right by a cryptographic key um and uh and that also you know if you know what the you know gateways are uh to get that code who are you know relaying that code from the chain down

73. 34:31

    into your browser um then this is a part of that story so do you want to describe the the boss stack yeah I mean we we can dive into that so as Ted uh described um I mean it this approach is trying to solve an a number of uh things some of them are on security side some of them on just disc discoverability side but yeah I mean the stack of the decentralized front ends allows to have kind of the

74. 35:05

    application kind of front and code itself stored on blockchain managed by potentially exactly the same way that smart contracts are manage so you can ensure that this smart contract uh for example was deployed by this Dow or by this multi or business address and so the same address have deployed the front end there's actually even uh Stronger relationship that you can build beyond that which is you can require smart contract to like you can

75. 35:36

    only operate from this front end with the smart contract and so compliant gateways actually can enforce that and ensure additional security around um that like you canot use like some you know kind of malicious front end as well how do you enforce that is that with the does the that this is this would be enforced on like wallet Gateway side okay yeah so it's like if if your W wallet presumably compliant with this protocol now when it tries to send you

76. 36:06

    know a transaction if it's coming from a component that's not WID listed it like hey this is not valid right say for Gateway like it would just like say hey this is inv valid and I mean obviously again you can override this so this is where like as a power user you can do whatever you want from a command line kind of thing but uh but it allows to have like a you know a very nice

77. 36:31

    additional benefits around kind of security of just like you randomly you know accessing something that's like Trant fish you so so that's kind of the uh the system and then there's gateways which are you know in a way like apps websites it can be mobile app can be wallet that actually renders this content from the blockchain and actually shows you the interfaces and so uh the kind of one

78. 37:02

    of the opportunities is to put this gateways as wide as possible because they are pretty much a way to uh you know also have a sensorship resistance as well as if it you know you control the Gateway you know that enforces the the kind of rules that you uh selected to as well as removes a lot potentially tracking that you may not want for privacy reasons and so that's where kind of partnership with orbit came in as a way to receive a massive

79. 37:33

    distribution for this gateways kind of across the all of the personal servers that orbit has yeah that was the first um the first work that we did with near was to um uh make it so that you know you can just install an app on your urbit and then it can become a boss Gateway and so you can serve all the front ends um from the near chain three your own herbit and um I remember being prettyy surprised and impressed when I

80. 38:03

    first heard about boss because um I thought okay I didn't know that there were any chains where you could just store all the source code for a whole system onchain you and have that be something that's um you know economically viable right I don't know how much it would cost to do that on ethereum I think something prohibitive all your money yeah um and uh so that's that was the first sort of taste I got of near being

81. 38:35

    a bit of a different beast from other blockchains right there's a different approach um and uh and it makes a lot of sense right that is that is where you want um that kind of data stored it's public you want it signed um and the the next thing that we're now what um so we actually just added an division to urbit foundation and it's called urbit labs and um and it's the purpose of it is to um to

82. 39:06

    build uh application Level uh you know features like uh you know infrastructure type stuff mostly that's not in the urbit operating system itself it's it's in user space so it's you know application Level uh but it's you know general purpose infrastructure and so a lot of that that urbit lab is uh collaborating with other organizations largely but not exclusively in crypto um and uh so yeah so now uh we have a few uh a few developers working full-time there now and they're uh one of their

83. 39:40

    first uh projects is uh forking the forking nears uh you near social VM uh so that it's urbit aware and so then the um uh so you can use you know your herbit ID and your near ID uh you know as part of um you know as as part of the same system uh and and also forking uh the boss VM uh which runs in the browser so that's the you know the thing that loads these components and runs the components that they downloads off chain uh forking that so that can speak to near and then

84. 40:18

    through near of course to other blockchains um but then also uh it'll be aware of your herbit so it could talk to your urbit right so it could send commands you know read data and send commands to your uh to your urbit applications so now you could write a front end you once once we have that um and the near social VM my understanding is that they're expecting to be done with that sometime this week so I'm excited to see that um but the

85. 40:44

    um uh once you can you know once you can write a front end that you know is loaded from the chain right and then it can talk to the chain all right and it can also for doing public anything public public right moving money um contracts right and then also talk to yourit if for doing anything private or you know sort of uh you know private and social um like either just you know one

86. 41:08

    person or small group um or a large group eventually the um you know that's that's a pretty powerful system right now you have um this sort of uh it's like a sort of full stack um yeah we of delivering software in this decentralized manner yeah I think yeah to double down I think this idea that you can kind of in one application both use the kind of the public chain data right and again near and through kind of the chain aggregation chain abstraction we're

87. 41:47

    doing you'll be able to transact across all the blockchains Bitcoin etherium EPM salana Etc and at the same time you can interact with the your private data that's stored on your private server and uh through that also connect to other people in the net in kind of the urbit network I think that's very powerful because now as a developer you know before for example we had uh one of developers who was Building inside boss synchronization

88. 42:17

    like for gaming or for something else the things that you don't don't or can't put on public chain and so this opens up kind of a very interesting ways to really build uh those applications where you can like create a you know kind of on your urbit server spin up a state of the game get other people to join just kind of synchronize with it play the game you know deposit money uh for example into the pot based on who wins a game in herbit you know commit to that

89. 42:47

    uh on chain to uh pay out maybe then you know run a tournament for other people to join and so you can kind of continue like expanding the scope of that project um and so this kind of you know pretty much a powerful primitive that adds this functionality yeah yeah and then you can start to see the the like the way that you can um yeah that the private and public data can start to work together right and you have you this sort of unified web 3 client that's in the browser or in some app and it's talking

90. 43:19

    to the you know to near and to urbet um yeah even for the you know that podcasting example earlier right a podcast app it' be cool if you could do SoundCloud style like put a comment at some place in the audio stream right and then you know that gets distributed to you know people in your social graph or in some group that you're in that's sharing this thing around right and then

91. 43:45

    you could you know even maybe collaborate with you know five other people in your social graph and do a you know multisig through your orbit right um and some of that's offchain right has done urbit to urbit to set up the multisig right and then and then they you put something on chain and then that you know starts up the subscription right or you're bidding on some some item or something right but you can imagine all these social things where you have a big off offchain component

92. 44:09

    that's doing a lot of social stuff that's quick private you don't need to you don't need or want to put it on any kind of chain um but then you know at some point you know one of those actions that you take as a group or as an individual ends up needing to go onchain and you need that to integrate right and then also using the chain as the the ultimate back stop for where the data is stored where it's ultimately delivered from how everybody gets sort of the

93. 44:33

    Baseline of agreement on all the sort of underlying facts of the that Software System um and that that just starts to I think look and feel pretty good right it's like then um web three works exactly starting to work yeah yeah so maybe we have like a few minutes left so maybe we get some questions uh from the audience if there are any because I think we we can keep going at is for hours uh and we have before so uh

94. 45:07

    yeah but yeah definitely topics here talk about hours um really exciteful stuff I think a lot of people might have even gotten some really good ideas on things to kind of like be keep top of mind while while building or you know kind of like good things to kind of take away from this uh Twitter spaces in regards to developments um like I said if anybody has any questions or any feedback or comments or anything they just have top of Mind from from any of

95. 45:29

    the discussions today feel free to uh request speaker and I'm happy to get you up here with the few minutes we have left for example if you want to know what's the next app to build the killer app for all of the VB 3 combining herbit and near and the chain abstraction exstasy I got uh Seth up here to uh he requested to speak so if you if you're here uh you are connected feel free to go

96. 46:06

    ahead hey what's going on guys um yeah I to speak earlier I was uh appreciating the conversation about software suppliance trade security it's like one of those boring un sexy topics but it's actually incredibly important and will only become more important I think that we saw like with uh Ledger kit and the uh vulnerability recently um just how destructive potentially a sare supply chain attack could be and uh yeah this

97. 46:33

    is what we're working on at archetype and we're building on herbit and we're building on near and uh yeah if anyone wants to talk more about sare supply chain security the TR thanks Seth yeah exciting awesome awesome yeah thank you for coming up here super excited stuff um if anybody else I mean it doesn't look like anybody else is requesting but I'll give it another 30 seconds um if anybody else has any questions anything they want to ask uh proba get provide me

98. 47:07

    feedback uh in the meantime Theodore Ilia do you have anything else that you'd like to say uh in regards to bit's partnership on near anything that you think you missed um well I think actually we covered quite a bit of it um I think the uh maybe one thing we didn't discuss too much was uh we mentioned it a little bit offand but uh unifying the um uh or not unifying but uh getting sort of um cross- linking

99. 47:41

    between urbit ID and near ID um and um yeah because that's uh both urbit and near have sort of interesting approaches to that uh and urbit and near both have name spaces um that I think yours is also and ett's namespace is referentially transparent and I think nears is also actually but you do yours by block height to keep it to keep it referentially transparent or block hash perhaps

100. 48:12

     um but I know that's something that we've um we've discussed a bit in the past um the uh so and as as for these you know name spaces uh and the IDS their ways of um you know the namespace is a way of laying out data it's sort of like a URL um and it can be converted into a web URL um both both near and and herbets can be converted uh and um so I think that's a way that um you know the two systems could have a sort of deeper programmatic interaction um is through communicating you know in those name

101. 48:54

     spaces yeah I think think I mean in general with near we're trying to kind of create this mapping such that you know if you have a near account ideally have kind of mapping to addresses across you know the whole web three so you're able to participate kind of really easily in any of the uh AA systems and so I think linking with zbit makes a ton of sense I think the other interesting

102. 49:19

     thing that we haven't uh I don't think we started working on but we discussed around kind of uh the current ownership right of the address space uh is in this kind of non-m materialized rollup uh on ethereum that actually on near you are able to fully materialize by just writing a smart contract that reads the state from ethereum which we are we are posting through Rainbow Bridge so you have it actually fully available and secure uh on near and so that would allow to

103. 49:53

     actually link a lot of the um the address space related uh relationship as well to near in in an interesting way and kind of link that back into uh the ID space too yeah that's an exciting idea so if anyone is interested in diving in into near urbit intersection that might be an interesting project certainly up for everybody to to think about uh anybody that's building on near herbit uh there you go um I think we have time

104. 50:35

     for one more we have one more request let's go ahead and get George Marlo up here um and then I think that should be a wrap all right George you're connected go ahead hey guys thanks again for taking the time to do this I'm just going to kind of prod y'all a little bit um so in a world where everything is developed and urbit and near or fully married and chain abstraction is here could y'all compare how n.org on top of herbit will look like google.com looks like

105. 51:10

     today I mean near org is a gateway right so you're able to you know open an app you know some apps will be for example the podcast listening app right and like you'll have uh like it will connect to personal to personalized herbit server you know pull in the data from there marry it with your kind of blockchain data and show you the information and you will see the same experience if you go to your herbit um server itself and kind of open the application there you'll see the

106. 51:44

     same if you go to any other Gateway or app Etc so like the idea is like that the you know you kind of decom like right now we think of like you know you go to Facebook and you see Facebook data and that's only place you can see Facebook data and we kind of removed that right your personal data is stored on herbit your kind of public data stored on chain and then the application code itself you know lives on blockchain as well and so now it doesn't matter

107. 52:09

     where you go you you can get all this components cooked for you right wherever you are in exactly the same way in predictable way and now you can interact with them so and again near the door is just going to be one of the I mean it is one of the gateways already uh we have actually a Gateway drop you can explore uh and obviously uh bbits have this as well so for folks who have herbit they

108. 52:31

     can uh kind of install it and try it out yeah you know um I can what I can maybe end it on uh one little sort of user-facing vision um you imagine that you could no matter where you go in the world if you go and you see a uh yeah there's a computer screen and a keyboard and um the uh and maybe uh yeah so you can go up to that and you can type in a password right or do some other sort of

109. 53:03

     login uh maybe you have your little Hardware wallet and you just stick it in or it does a little uh you know QR code back and forth something like that um something where you're using your your private key you keep secure but then you can sort of sign something to get access to this device and this device actually goes and pulls your a bunch of you know data off of uh blockchain and off of herbit right based

110. 53:29

     on that key and downloads it into this sort of ephemeral client device so now no matter where you go you can just you know pick up where you left off right I just have like a little maybe I have a maybe it's a ring you know and I touch the ring to the computer right um um but there's some way that you know my private key can just you know sign something and then I can get access to this device temporarily and it'll start downloading based on that key download

111. 53:53

     whatever applications it needs and now you know I don't even really need to you know own a full computer at any given time I can just kind of pull up pull up anything um like it but uh but that is done in a sort of objective manner in way that's it's really not at the moment okay thank you that quite literally blew my mind that is extr extremely exciting to think about um one more question real quick will we see personal AI agents on herbit and near this year oh yeah the the native Planet

112. 54:35

     built one already it's a little slow they called it pen pal but uh but there's a lot of activity in that space pen pal okay I'll check it out thank you it's pen pal because it takes like a day to write you back yeah it's not quite that long but it takes it takes a little while yeah so there um they'll have to B the GPU onto it to really uh get it going quick thank you George appreciate you coming up again great question um and yeah that's that's all time we have for today and George just on that I mean really good last question but uh

113. 55:12

     regarding AI um for everybody here uh the next IL series Twitter spaces will be next uh week on Wednesday the 2 it will be around will be AI Focus Twitter spaces um and also if you didn't catch opportunity so definitely don't miss it look out for the tweets and like I said earlier uh this was also recorded in podcast format uh so you know expect to see this on Twitter uh in a video format as well uh so appreciate you all being here and uh looking forward to having you on the next one take care everybody

114. 55:43

     have a wonderful day thanks everyone thank you