Urbit, Nockchain, and the Current State of Sovereignty Technology
I learned a lot, I think, the past few years about technology projects and about markets and sentiment and the difficulties of assessing things and expectations and timelines. I think I kind of decided at a certain point, if I believe in something, I should work quietly on it behind the scenes and not necessarily bang the drum publicly. I had kids a couple years ago, I frankly have fallen off, to be totally honest. I think I'm back on track now. Everything's pretty much ramping back up to a 100% in terms of my writing and my content and all of that.
Justin Murphy:This is really cool. I genuinely like this and wanna hang out with these people. Like, these are my people as an entrepreneur and a creator and someone who wants to live and create and build at the speed of cutting edge technology. There is a time and place for hard work behind the scenes. There are periods where quiet and patience and steady work without fanfare are the appropriate mode.
Justin Murphy:What's going on everybody? I wanna talk to you today about Urbit. Urbit is the radical technology project to basically create a whole new Internet. This is a project that I got very interested in a few years back. And for about a year or two, I was talking about it a ton.
Justin Murphy:I was really excited by it, and I wanted to help it. I wanted to help it grow, and I became good friends with a lot of people in that ecosystem, and just kind of got really into it. Then at a certain point, I stopped talking about it. I think some people maybe wonder about why that is. And also, people are probably just curious about what's going on with the network.
Justin Murphy:It's gone through quite a lot of interesting ups and downs in the past few years. It's been a pretty crazy story, actually. So I just feel like it's time for me to reflect a little bit on Urbit. And partially, I want to share with you what's been going on with it in the past few years. I've just been close to it all, and I can tell that story in an honest way that's interesting for people to hear about and learn about.
Justin Murphy:But also, I learned a lot, I think, in the past few years about technology projects, and about markets, and sentiment, and the difficulties of assessing things, and expectations, and timelines, and things like this. So I feel like it's a really interesting set of experiences to reflect on. I think I've learned a lot, and I wanna use this as an opportunity to share where Urban has been since I first started talking about it in the past few years. But also to kind of note some surprises in my own mind, and how I've updated my own mental model about urbit in its own case, but also about radical technology projects like urbit more generally. What I find most interesting and exciting right now, as it happens, I've been quietly working pretty closely with a startup that came out of the Urbit ecosystem.
Justin Murphy:This is the Zorp Corporation, radical technology project. Very similar mission, similar vision, I would say. And it's a lot of the Urbit people, so it's the same kind of DNA. But it's a very different model that they have in mind, and what they're trying to build is fundamentally distinct and different. I've actually been working with them.
Justin Murphy:I'm pretty much on the team at this point. I've been running their content operations quietly for the past year. I haven't talked about that at all, actually, because, well, for certain reasons that have to do with how I've learned and certain updates I've made to my own mental model of how media and technology really should interact. I think I kind of decided at a certain point, if I believe in something, I should work quietly on it behind the scenes and not necessarily bang the drum publicly. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Justin Murphy:I think if you believe in something, you should do that also. I just, in my own personal case, I think I got very excited about Urbit, and I was banging the drum a ton. And I don't regret that at all. I mean, I still really like Urbit. I'm super proud to, you know, be associated with Urbit.
Justin Murphy:A lot of people associate me with Urbit. I still think it's very possible and maybe even probable that Urbit, you know, takes over the world someday. I think I've updated my model of that in in a few crucial ways, which I do want to kind of reflect on with you and share with you. But my basic view remains the same. I'm just an enthusiastic guy.
Justin Murphy:I get really into things. And when I get carried away, like to have fun with it and go hard and talk about it and whatever. So that's fine. But I definitely, looking back on it, I think I was a little overexcited on certain things. Miscalculated on certain things.
Justin Murphy:The interesting thing about markets and startups is that these are empirical realities. There's a history. You can track your thesis, and you can evaluate whether you were right or wrong, and how you were right or wrong based on what actually happens. And in the case of Urbit, really interesting things actually happen. So you have to kind of do that work of going back over and thinking, what did I think at this point?
Justin Murphy:And how was I right or wrong? And so I haven't talked about Urban in a few years. And so, well, I I mean, I haven't talked about much in a few years, frankly. I had kids a couple years ago, and I frankly have fallen off, to be totally honest. I I think I'm back on track now.
Justin Murphy:Everything's pretty much ramping back up to a 100% in terms of my writing and my content and all of that. But I fell off. I'm not gonna not gonna mince words about that. And so I stopped talking about a lot of things. Just about everything, to be fair, for a couple years, while I kind of learned how to have small children.
Justin Murphy:Anyway, I'm back up for air now. I want to kind of do a full accounting of where everything's been in the past few years. Hey, everybody. Real quick. I finally finished writing my latest book, The Independent Scholar, and it's the best thing I've written, the most important thing I've written because it compiles everything I've learned over the past five years figuring out this new lifestyle slash business model of mine working full time as an independent scholar outside of institutions and on the Internet.
Justin Murphy:Since I left academia five years ago, I've been experimenting like crazy, testing all different kinds of things. I've done books and courses and subscriptions, and I've tried it all. I've tested every model, and I've learned so much. I've made so many mistakes, but I've also done things well. And I've earned a few $100,000 doing all these different things.
Justin Murphy:Now I've really got the model down, the ideal model. I've narrowed it down to what works the best and what's most reproducible for most people. Just a super practical focused book, what works and what doesn't work in the most concise and practical format possible. So buy it. Order it now online at otherlife.co/scholar.
Justin Murphy:You can also just search for the independent scholar book. Maybe add Justin Murphy in there if you want to find it more easily. Otherlife.co/scholar. Go by The Independent Scholar, the ideal model. Everything I've learned over the past five years working full time as an independent scholar.
Justin Murphy:Thank you. I'm very proud of it. Otherlife.co/scholar. So when I first seriously learned about Urbit, when I really studied it and grokked it, I judged it to be a underrated project, which was being kind of systematically underpriced for specifiable reasons. I wrote a long essay back at this time about why I thought that was happening and the examples of that that I was seeing.
Justin Murphy:At the same time, I was meeting a lot of the people in this ecosystem, and they were super cool, just really smart people who I genuinely really like. They were just like me in a lot of ways. And I would be remiss to not point out that there's also this kind of high energy, somewhat euphoric crypto market happening in the background. And at the time, I think I did not appreciate how much that was coloring my perceptions. But in retrospect, I think that will end up being one of the bigger lessons I take away from those couple of years.
Justin Murphy:Basically, there were a lot of random people making tons of money by just being a part of some random ecosystem, some blockchain this or token that. And most of which was nonsense. Like, was genuinely a lot of it was total BS. And I'm looking at that, and remember, I'm fresh out of academia. I had just left my career, which I was sort of ensconced in for my entire adult life.
Justin Murphy:I've never been exposed to markets in my entire life. So I'm coming out of that. I'm navigating the world. I'm looking to see what's interesting. It just so happens that the world is in this kind of crazy period where a bunch of random people are creating all kinds of weird technologies, dubious technologies, many of which seem to be literally nothing.
Justin Murphy:They're getting all this attention. They're getting all these users. In some cases, they're making all this money. And I can see that a lot of it is just nonsense. And then I come across Urbit and I'm like, okay, no one's really talking about this yet.
Justin Murphy:This seems actually really smart and interesting and cool. And I'm meeting the people and they're genuinely really smart. I found an underpriced gem. And I was like, this is really cool. And if all of that other stuff is finding success and spreading like wildfire, and people are making money and building cool things and things are taking off, and a lot of that is crap, and I found this thing that's like underrated, underpriced, and actually genuinely really cool, well, I could just help this thing find its proper level and get it more understood by people.
Justin Murphy:And we bring on more users. And the cool thing about crypto and that whole promise of permissionless economies is precisely that you can find something early, and you can get involved, and you can get your hands dirty. And at the same time, you can kind of put your money where your mouth is, and help bring things into the world, and get exposure at the same time. And you know, it's funny. I mean, I remember being quite inspired by Michael Saylor.
Justin Murphy:I have no pretensions to being some kind of big businessman or anything like that. But just it's an interesting example. This guy loaded up on Bitcoin and then just went around the world being a really good articulate proponent of Bitcoin, and did very well for himself doing this. And at least so far, we'll see how that pans out. But I just thought this was very cool, and admirable, and he's sharp, he's intelligent, and he's a hustler.
Justin Murphy:And I remember thinking like, man, that's really inspiring and interesting. If you're interested in social science. Right? And if you're interested in having a unique model of the world that you think is maybe one or 2% more correct than the conventional model, well then you should be able to bet on that. Right?
Justin Murphy:And you should be able to make interesting things happen that other people can't. Right? And so that was very much the background here. The background kind of conditions, the things that I'm seeing and feeling when I encounter Urbit. And so that was what made me feel inspired.
Justin Murphy:And I was like, this is an underpriced gem. This is really cool. I genuinely like this and wanna hang out with these people. Like, these are my people, whether this project succeeds or not. And I have a newsletter and a and a, you know, YouTube and podcast.
Justin Murphy:So I'm just gonna throw my weight behind this, and let's try to make this thing real. The other thing that was also that it did seem to me objectively, and it seemed to many people in the ecosystem at the time that Urban was on the cusp of of breaking out. For many reasons, it had just shipped. The network had just shipped. So what seemed to be some pretty significant kind of paradigm changing upgrades in the form of, for instance, the app ecosystem.
Justin Murphy:So for the first time in Urbit's like ten year history at the time, anyone could build an Urbit app and ship it to the network, and everyone else could find it, and download it, and use it, and people could find each other on those apps. This is pretty cool. And in principle, it worked. Like that was shipped, and that was delivered at right around the time that I'm kind of really getting into it. So I'm like, wow, this is genuinely really amazing and impressive.
Justin Murphy:All we really need is more people to use this network, and then we need startups to build on it, and then capital will flow into this space, and then more people will find out about it, and it'll become more useful, and then more people will be wanna be on it, and stay on it. And so it, you know, it was very plausible at the time to see Urbit as on the brink of a flywheel. So all of these considerations are in the background and feeding into my perception and evaluation of Urbit. And my decision to throw my weight behind it and make it something I was sharing about it, analyzing it, and talking about it. And I tried to build on it as well, like my own community and stuff like that.
Justin Murphy:I'm not a software engineer or anything, but even software actually. Commissioned some software on there, did these different interesting experiments, because this is what was so cool about it, is the promise of kind of decentralized, kind of community based software development and things like this. So I was really doing all this. Oh, and by the way, people have asked me this here and there over the years. I was never being paid by Urbit.
Justin Murphy:First of all, Urbit isn't Urbit is just the name of this decentralized ecosystem. Urbit is not an entity per se. So there was no one who could pay me to talk about Urbit. I came across it totally on my own, got passionate about it totally on my own, and started writing and talking about it because I thought I found something really cool, I wanted to talk about it. And I thought I understood something better than other people that people had not caught onto yet.
Justin Murphy:So I found that naturally motivating and interesting to share and develop my ideas around it. I was given a few stars at some point, like a few junctures. I was given stars, like as a gift from the Urban Foundation or whoever, because that's what all ecosystems do to kind of just reward valuable contributors, basically. But those were just retroactive grants, and they never totaled to too much. I mean, in the world of urban investors, I'm like, I assure you, nothing.
Justin Murphy:I just have a handful of stars to this day. And I did buy a few myself as well. Oh, this is an underpriced gem. I'm gonna try to throw my weight behind it. I bought a few at that point.
Justin Murphy:But remember, I never had any money. I was an academic. So I had I think I bought a couple of stars when I first got into it myself. Then later after, you know, becoming like a pretty valuable contributor, I mean, I did a lot of stuff. Like, I, you know, brought a lot of people onto the network, and really helped a lot of people understand it.
Justin Murphy:You go into an Urban Meetup today, and a good fraction of the people there will say that they found out about it through me. So it makes sense that they gifted me some stars. Anyway, I was never paid by Urbit. You can't be paid by Urbit. I did, at then another point, started doing some consulting for like, Urbit Startups.
Justin Murphy:And that moment of Urban Startups is its own story that I wanna get into next. So at a certain point, I was hired by a company here or there to help with their internal stuff, like messaging, marketing, and that kind of stuff. Even that was only a handful of months, really. And those startups did not work out. And that's a key part of the story, which we'll get to in a minute.
Justin Murphy:But just wanted to respond to that, because a couple of people had asked me this when I met them over the years. And that made me actually realize like, wow, I actually really did help Urban a lot by talking about it so much, Because That people actually thought I was like being paid. I must have been doing a good job. Oh, and by the way, I still own the overwhelming majority of all the stars that I've ever owned. So I never made any money on Urban address space.
Justin Murphy:I've I've held them all, and I still hold them. I think I've sold a couple here and there, but very, very few. The address space went quite high in value at a certain point in the kind of bull run of the crypto market, and then totally went down. The address space has been really destroyed in the past few years. So let's try to understand why that is.
Justin Murphy:What happened? What went wrong? Let's go to the startup period, we'll call it. There was a period where three or four startups raised money to build companies on top of Urban. These were a few different projects.
Justin Murphy:One was a layer two blockchain project, Lookbar. One was a consumer social product, Hollium. One was originally a kind of consumer creator project, Terrell. They were going to do kind of like a Substack type product on Urbit and Payment Rails. I'm deep into Urbit at this time.
Justin Murphy:As I said, I was sort of, you know, doing a little bit of advising or consulting within some of these companies. And what I got to kind of see firsthand, personally, was that basically, in every case, each company eventually determined that they could not do what they wanted to do on Urbit. And each project eventually defected, and decided to go a separate way. Because of limitations of the core Urbit network. I think in some cases, the issues had to do with speed, speed of one kind or another being an insufficient.
Justin Murphy:I think in other cases, the over the air updates, I think were pretty brutal, if I recall correctly. I mean, experienced this firsthand myself multiple times, just as being the host of a active group, and running some of my own ships, and and even just with the limited things I was maintaining on Urbit. The over the air updates are when the whole network basically upgrades itself, and these updates have to propagate through the system. In an ideal world, that all just happens behind the scenes, and everything just works the next day. In practice, virtually everything would break, is my memory of it.
Justin Murphy:At least a handful of times. Like, I'm not sure about how that system is doing right now, but there was a year or so where every time there was an over the air update, basically, it was just a nightmare for anyone maintaining serious applications on the network. And I think that was not planned. That I think people were not expecting it to be that rough, and I think that was one example of one of the underlying issues. I think a lot of us were too optimistic about the state of the underlying network.
Justin Murphy:And one of the most interesting developments since then is that the founder, the inventor of Urbit, Curtis Jargon, who you might know from other contexts, as a writer, he's on my podcast a while back, interesting thinker and writer in his own respect. He stepped back into the project, and he is now the leader of Urbit. So this is very interesting. I don't think anyone was expecting this. He had officially and completely withdrawn from the thing that he created, and he was brought back through investors, decided that something drastic had to be done, and you had to bring the founder back to right the ship.
Justin Murphy:That happened only within the past year. If you listen to what he has said since coming back, I think he's made it pretty clear that everyone got ahead of their skis, and that the network was not sufficiently developed and not sufficiently advanced and hardened, and that it was perhaps too soon to have startups trying to raise money and build on this thing. Of course, that's easier to say in retrospect after that appears to have been the case. But I think he's right there. I think it is just an ineluctable inference that that moment where we all thought that there were going to be startups building on Urbit, and bringing new capital, and bringing more users, and improving the experience at an accelerating rate.
Justin Murphy:That moment, I think that expectation was just miscalculated, I think. Now there's another key variable in all of this, which is the crypto market. And at one point in this cycle, the Urban address space, the kind of investable asset that trades on the market went up quite high. Like if I remember correctly, I think an Urban Star was worth like something like $20,000 or more, maybe. Now it's like closer to like 1,000 or something like that.
Justin Murphy:The reason that this matters is that the value of the asset has a huge psychological effect on everything, basically. Urbit was actually one of the first serious projects to use NFTs, to actually be built on NFTs. The Urbit identity system is built on Ethereum, and it was done so way before it was cool, way before the trendy appreciation of NFT assets that happened a few years back. It was way before that that the decision was made to put the identity system on Ethereum functionally as NFTs. And so again, back at that time when I'm coming across this stuff for the first time, I'm like, this is so much proof that this really is a kind of visionary project, like five steps ahead of everything else.
Justin Murphy:It sort of understood NFTs before they were even cool. I was like, this is all incredible setup. And when the world realizes how promising this project is, these assets are going to go through the roof. That's going to make more people pay attention. That's going to give developers more money to play with.
Justin Murphy:That's going to bring in more investors. That's going to bring in more startups trying to do stuff, and it would be this kind of, you know, positive feedback loop. And so, when the startup part of that feedback loop failed, it was followed by gradually descent of the value of the address space. That alone doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the value or the promise of the product. Especially because the implementation of the identity system was established before we had very sophisticated mental models of tokenomics.
Justin Murphy:It was not designed in a way to make the price go up. Nothing about Urbit was designed to make the price go up. In the way that nowadays, with all of the lessons learned through, you know, a few crypto cycles now, you can design token projects in very clever and sophisticated ways that almost guarantee the price goes up in certain ways. You can be very strategic and clever about that, and if you execute properly, you can launch absolutely crap products that have no original engineering, that have no vision at all, that do nothing really. And if the tokenomics are engineered correctly, a bunch of people can make a lot of money doing through this kind of tokenomic engineering.
Justin Murphy:All of Urbit and its NFT layer was built and designed before there was any strategic calculation around tokenomics. And so this came to really hurt Urbit because it is just the fact that emotions and market values are strong variables in this whole game of getting users, and winning hearts and minds, and then winning more capital, and getting that flywheel going. And so despite lacking tokenomics, the Urban Atro space pumps up quite well at one point. Stars are worth like more than $20,000 each. That's obviously really exciting.
Justin Murphy:But then when that goes down, I think it goes down more brutally than almost any other crypto project. So that now, right now, I think you can actually make the case that Urbit is once again the most undervalued crypto project out there. I actually think that's even possibly more true now because it's been sort of overly punished by its failure to make good on its initial hype cycle. And so once the startups decided that they could not build on Urbit, and then the address space gradually declined to really painfully low level. I think that's when I kind of personally was like, okay.
Justin Murphy:However strong and promising this project might be, it's clearly not going to blow up in the short term, which is what I wanted to happen. And that was my mental model of the world at that time, to be clear. That was my thesis explicitly. It was now's the perfect time. This thing could really work.
Justin Murphy:It's awesome and underrated. Let's get attention on it. Let's get capital flowing into the space. Let's get startups building on it, and let's get users to grow. And if we do all of those things right now, then I think this could take over the world.
Justin Murphy:Like now. Starting now. Obviously, that would be a process to take over the world, but it could really kick off starting right now. Once the startups quit, and the address space deflated, I think at that point, it was clear that my thesis was wrong, and that was not going to happen in the short term. This says nothing about Urbet's ability to succeed in the long term or even the medium term, especially now that Curtis is back at you know, that's a big variable.
Justin Murphy:Who knows what could happen moving forward? I wouldn't I'm not counting Urbet out at all. I'm just updating on the past up till this point, and trying to be honest and and and transparent about what my thinking was and what actually happened. Now, what's interesting about this whole story is that in many ways since that time, urbit has actually made great strides. So I should point out that urbit now has a really good iPhone app that anyone can get, and anyone can get on the network on their phone in a very normal, traditional social media website type experience.
Justin Murphy:And they can get their own personal server running on on the internet, and they can be chatting and talking with a kind of Signal like or Telegram like experience on their phone pretty quickly and easily. And it's pretty fast. It works pretty smoothly. It's not quite signal or telegram in terms of speed and reliability, but it is actually surprisingly close, and much, much better than it was even when I got really into Urbit. So all of these little subtle ways, Urban continues to actually improve objectively.
Justin Murphy:And with Curtis taking back the reins, there's really no telling what could happen with good leadership and with a new direction. And it's really an opportunity to recreate a whole new narrative and bootstrap a whole new period of growth and perception around Urbit. So it could just be the case that Urbit is going to require another twenty years. It's not crazy to think that. If you look at something like Linux, you know, from the beginning to its eventual success and domination, it was at least twenty years.
Justin Murphy:Some great projects do just take a very long time. It's obviously not a traditional startup. Its structure is not that of a startup. Its vision is not that really of a startup. And what it's trying to do is really truly so bold that, in retrospect, maybe it just makes sense that it needs to take a ton of time.
Justin Murphy:And I was just foolish for thinking that it could be done so quickly. So, that's the main way that I've updated my mental model about urbit, frankly. To put it simply, is I actually don't think my judgment or evaluation of the project was fundamentally wrong in any way except the timeline. I think I was overly optimistic about the timeline. I was euphoric, in part due to a market environment that I was utterly naive to and green towards.
Justin Murphy:I had never been in a bull market. I had never owned any assets at all, basically, let alone owning a couple assets that were appreciating rapidly. Here I'm just talking about like a little bit of Bitcoin, a little bit of Ethereum at that time. I'm watching the numbers on my little ledger wallet grow really fast. And it was the first time I've ever seen that happen on my computer in any of my accounts in my life.
Justin Murphy:I did not realize how much that was affecting my perception of everything, basically. So that's the lesson that I learned. Those are the main lessons that I've taken away from it all. In that context, there's just not really anything for me to do with Urbit right now, or there's no real way for me. I can't really recruit developers through my media, which I was doing actually, like pretty well even.
Justin Murphy:To this day, I mean, are high ranking Urbit engineers in the ecosystem who found out about it through me, and got into it through me. I can't really do that kind of contribution right now, because it seems objectively like it's not ready yet. And I still host a community on urbit, but again, it's taking a very long time for Urbit to just have a user experience that is even on par with a simple chat app like Signal or Telegram. So, you know, as an entrepreneur and a creator, and someone who, you know, wants to live and create and build at the speed of cutting edge technology, I was really down to get my hands dirty and work with Urbit and build things on Urbit when I saw, in my mind, a clear trajectory to doing that collaboratively with the ecosystem in a way that could bootstrap it into the Urbit takeover. Like, so long as I could see even a plausible model to bet on the Urbit takeover, was down to get my hands dirty and try things and try to build things, and even bring people on and try to build my own community structures there.
Justin Murphy:But at this moment, it's hard to see how ERBT has that kind of takeoff opportunity in the short term. I can't really justify to myself or to other people, you know, why they should jump through these other hoops to get onto this system When I can't really do that much on the system yet, it still does have these issues. I mean, when I was trying to build my community on Urbit, I'm not even talking about some fancy software engineering project, but just trying to host and grow a community and do different things on there, like courses and meetings for my own business. It was pretty painful. Like, there was just constant little hang ups, basically.
Justin Murphy:And it was kind of death by a thousand paper cuts. Like the OTAs, for instance, were pretty brutal on me. Like there were whole days, whole weeks even, where like, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm not like rolling in the dough or anything. And I'm personally trying to solve pretty technical challenges.
Justin Murphy:I just couldn't really make it work economically and personally to really keep using it for my own serious work. And so that's why I haven't really talked about it. Because I haven't wanted to you know, I still love Urban, and still love all the people. And I never wanted it to seem like I was, you know, bringing it down or being negative or whatever when, you know, people were working really hard to keep things moving. But now it's just a natural moment right now where the address space could not be lower in the market.
Justin Murphy:Curtis has just taken over, and there was a major leadership reshuffling. So everything's been reset. There are rumors circulating about a few other, you know, positive developments, which I won't confirm or deny because I have nothing to do with them. Basically, many possible ways in which the whole project gets reset and relaunched and revivified, but right now is a natural kind of resetting period. So it's a good time, I think, to come up for air and share all of these stories and reflections.
Justin Murphy:So then it was about a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago now, that I was approached by one of my Urbit friends, Logan Allen, who was building a startup as well. He actually was one of the co founders of Terrell, the company that was initially going to do kind of sub stack plus payment rails operation on Urbit. They raised money to do that. And somewhere along that process, he had some really harebrained realizations about the value of Urbit's programming language, the lower level language of NOC, the machine code language, the instruction set, as they call it. He had some crazy realizations that this was really uniquely good for zero knowledge proofs.
Justin Murphy:And zero knowledge proofs, in my estimation, represent one of the most singular and specific vectors of transformative sovereignty technology out there. It's sort of it's obviously within the field of cryptography, but it's sort of better to even think about it as something different than crypto. It's a very specific scientific and technical discovery, this concept of zero knowledge proofs, how to do them, how to make them, and what they mean and how they work. This is a kind of discovery within cryptography that could very well end up being as significant as what we now call crypto more generally, or let's say distributed ledgers, like Bitcoin or whatnot. So this is not a video all about zero knowledge proofs, but you're probably familiar with the basic intuition.
Justin Murphy:A zero knowledge proof basically lets you prove something without actually revealing the underlying information. You could, for instance, prove that you have a certain amount of money in your bank account without giving anyone the actual numbers in your bank account. You could also prove that an entire software program that you built does what it says it does, and it doesn't do anything else. You could prove this in a very tiny little piece of data. So you can actually prove something about a huge mass of data, with a proof that is only very, very tiny.
Justin Murphy:The size of the proof is more or less constant, no matter how much data you're kind of compressing. It increases a very tiny bit, with huge increases of data. And so it has this extraordinary kind of compression value, but also this extraordinary political and sociological value as well. It pretty much turns upside down everything that we currently assume about sharing data on the Internet. What's most interesting about zero knowledge proofs is that no one has really built a fundamentally civilization changing economic engine around these things.
Justin Murphy:Like Bitcoin, for instance, is this ingenious contraption. It's this sociotechnical game that organizes some cryptographic primitives in such an ingenious way that a self perpetuating and self enforcing monetary asset emerges as a result, and kind of bootstraps its own value. Gave crypto an economic engine that actually made it spread out into the world. It actually changed the nature of how we think about money, and how people store their money. And that's now having continuing ripples into financial institutions more broadly, which are still playing out.
Justin Murphy:They're only beginning to play out. So zero knowledge proofs are relatively new. They've only been around for a decade or two. I think Naval Ravikant tweeted not too long ago that the future of human freedom depends on zero knowledge proofs. So this idea is already in the ether, but we don't yet know how this technology is going to be mobilized.
Justin Murphy:How is it actually going to enter into our everyday computing systems, and into institutional data transmission pipelines of various sorts? That is actually very hard to see, and I don't think many people have a very strong thesis as to how to do that. Logan comes to me more than a year ago now, and says that they're going to just build a new blockchain from scratch, And it's going to be engineered to pretty much do to zero knowledge proving what Bitcoin did for money, is one way to think about it. And the question is, can you create an economic game, a protocol that game theoretically mobilizes different parties, such as miners, to actually just produce way more zero knowledge proofs, and to competitively do it, to optimize their hardware to do it, and to indirectly create around it a whole larger economy of zero knowledge proving. And if you could build such a game, if you could build this protocol that gets a large number of people competitively optimizing hardware to do zero knowledge proving, well then, guess what?
Justin Murphy:Maybe then, you could start plugging computers into that. People could start building software that leverages zero knowledge proofs. Maybe they're posting those proofs to that blockchain. Maybe they're using that blockchain in the long run as a kind of communication medium, basically. And anything you want to interact with the public world, you compress into zero knowledge proofs, post it to the chain, and other parties will be able to do with it only what they are entitled to do with it.
Justin Murphy:Now, this is all more abstract and long term. I'm just painting a picture. But in the short term, what is more concrete and specific is Bitcoin, of course, is a proof of work chain. This means you have to expend electricity energy to do computational puzzles in order to successfully mine Bitcoin, and this is how the chain achieves consensus and security. But the question has been, can you do this with zero knowledge proofs?
Justin Murphy:Can you merge, basically, or blend zero knowledge proving with proof of work? I got to speak personally with a leading, I mean, top of the line cryptography researcher not too long ago, and he told me that ZK Powell is pretty much the holy grail right now. And this is pretty much what Logan came to me, saying that he thinks he has a way to do this using knock. And that if it can be done with knock, it might actually be better and faster than a lot of the current state of the art technologies for ZK proving. And so it's very difficult to put a probability on these outcomes.
Justin Murphy:Right? Startups are intrinsically risky and uncertain. But Logan came to me with this proposition more than a year ago, and he asked me if I would help out with the messaging and the branding and the content strategy and the publishing. And over the past year, we actually managed to build a pretty sizable audience, including a lot of fairly elite opinion makers and players in the space. And over all that time, they worked on the product, and it now looks like they're getting ready to launch a totally novel blockchain, a zero knowledge proof of work blockchain.
Justin Murphy:And I haven't really talked about it too much for really two reasons. One is just that I've actually been working pretty hard with them and for them. And so now that I'm a slow middle aged father, I have been struggling to do much else, frankly. The other reason is, I would say a lesson that I learned from my years working closely within the urban ecosystem, which is just that I'm a little bit more measured, I think, around radical technology projects. Like, they're intrinsically risky, intrinsically difficult, and everyone knows that most startups fail.
Justin Murphy:It's just a basic statistical fact. And I just don't want to be a hype man for anything, really. Which is not to say I'm not willing to put my name on things. I certainly am. I just think that there is a time and place for hard work behind the scenes.
Justin Murphy:There are periods where quiet, and patience, and steady work without fanfare are the appropriate mode. And then there are times where you turn on the media, and you bang the drum, and you go to war in the public. And as I said, I have no regrets about my time banging the drum for Urbit. I mean, I still think Urbit is super cool. So I really don't regret it, but I definitely have to admit that I was overzealous.
Justin Murphy:My sense of the timeline was badly calibrated. Then you have to be measured, and you can't just go around promoting. I mean, when you look at Silicon Valley culture, it is one of the worst things about that world. In some ways, the American technology sector is becoming a kind of counter institution to the East Coast academic institutions in certain ways. They're kind of a new patron of arts and letters.
Justin Murphy:They have their own kind of intellectual organs emerging. There's a very interesting larger story there to be told that hasn't really been told yet. But one of the biggest drawbacks of that new pull of cultural power is that everyone is always talking their book. And VCs and founders are often very smart people, but the overwhelming majority of all words emitted by this larger collection of individuals is almost always hot air. It's almost all hot air.
Justin Murphy:I mean, the smartest VCs in American technology are some of the smartest people in the world. Some incredibly sharp, courageous, and bold thinkers. But the bottom 90% of VCs and founders who are doing any kind of public thought leadership are many of the most flimsy and motivated public figures in the world. Almost statistically, is the case because we know that, you know, 95% of startups fail. You know, I do think that more and more writers and thinkers and kind of post academics, such as myself, will find interesting homes for themselves sociologically and economically.
Justin Murphy:And many of those homes will be much better in every way than a lot of the homes that contemporary institutional academics have, is very difficult. And the way to do that has not yet been determined by anyone. That playbook has not been figured out. It's very live, and very new, and it's very riddled with risks, and temptations. And I think this is one of the biggest, which is just that it's very tempting and very easy on some level to become a kind of professional spokesman or hype man for any number of projects.
Justin Murphy:You could do this one project after another. Each one fails. Keep going to the next one. Like, if you're articulate and smart, you can absolutely, you know, get jobs doing this kind of stuff where you're just kind of hired to promote things and hype things. And when one thing fails, you go on to the next one.
Justin Murphy:And if your calling in life is to be a thoughtful, honest writer and thinker, and you have this long term creative project to study the world, but also to find alpha, and to exploit that alpha, and to throw your weight behind things that you believe in when you believe in them, You also want to be honest, and authentic, and trustworthy at all times. You better be really careful. You know what I mean? This is like a new type of personality, a new type of role, and these are new types of synthetic, creative, and economic partnerships, and collaborations that are now arising and emerging. And there are many examples of this kind of thing.
Justin Murphy:You can point to many, but it's still very unthoughtful and unconscious in many ways. It's being figured out experimentally. And I am just saying that in my own experiments so far. If I'm interested in a project, and I personally believe it's worth paying attention to, and it's worth working on, and it could actually be really big, and the people doing it are legit, and honest, and hardworking, and I can see the promise and the potential, and I judge it to be worth your time or attention, then I should spend my own time and effort and attention privately for a long time before I'm hyping it or telling other people about it or representing it in any way. And that's kind of the mistake I made with urbit.
Justin Murphy:And that's my own mistake. That's not urbit's mistake. That's me. Like, I got into it. I got passionate and enthusiastic.
Justin Murphy:And then I just sort of went hard in the paint, trying to get new users, trying to tell people about this thing, trying to help it blow up. But if I spent a year trying to build a startup on it first, then I probably would have been humbled. And then I might not have gotten so euphoric. And then I might not have miscalculated the timelines and my expectations in the ways that I think I did miscalculate them. So, that's why I've been working quietly with Zorp.
Justin Murphy:And I'm super proud of my role my humble role in the company. I think we've written something more like more than 50 blog posts or something once a week, every week, for more than a year. And I wrote all of Something like 30 or 40 of them are actually just totally original creative essays in philosophy and history and anthropology that I just cooked up myself, basically, in collaboration with Logan and in conversation with him over many things. Some of them are more motivated by some of his ideas he shared with me. Some of them are of my own creation, Sui Generis.
Justin Murphy:But obviously, Logan and I see things similarly, and we have a lot of shared references. So he just gave me full freedom, basically, to build a perspective around technology, and our kind of shared values. And for many of them, just let me go wild. And we've actually built an audience, and I'm it's pretty cool. Like, to have done that anonymously, I did that from scratch organically.
Justin Murphy:We actually built a little cult following, and, you know, we had a party a few months back in Austin, and a lot of people came out. So it was pretty special experience to be able to do that from scratch without my name, you know? And now they're getting ready to launch, and it's super exciting. It's nerve racking because they're hoping to launch imminently. If they launch and this thing if this machine works, it's a really crazy achievement and accomplishment.
Justin Murphy:I'm not close enough to the engineering to understand any of the details, but as far as I know, this thing is coming together. And I mean, if they bring into the world a zero knowledge proof of work blockchain from scratch, there's really no telling what that could eventually grow into. The long term implications of that are every bit as vertiginous, and exhilarating as the long term promises of Erbit. And in many ways, these are the same promises. The long term vision and goals are very much the same.
Justin Murphy:It's just a very difficult question about how to get there, and what kinds of machines and games does one have to build, in what order to actually bring that vision into the world concretely. I have no idea what's gonna happen. I'm obviously bullish and excited, and I wouldn't be working with them so closely for so long if I wasn't. But that's basically where I'm sitting right now, and what I'm seeing in this current state of radical sovereignty technology. Whether it's Erbit, or it's Nocturne, or maybe they both win, or maybe they, in some ways, become symbiotic in ways that can't be fully foreseen.
Justin Murphy:These are questions that anyone can guess about. But I've tried to share with you how I see things, how things have unfolded in my eyes, the judgments and the theses I've had at different junctures, and what I've learned from my experiences in this space, and thinking pretty carefully about these issues as deeply as I can, you know, for several years now. Nocturne is a permissionless protocol that anyone can mine. It's being launched as a fair launch. So that means there is no pre mined.
Justin Murphy:Meaning, every single token that is ever minted into existence on the NOK chain will be given to miners who competitively use their computational power to solve the proof of work puzzles on chain. And everyone in the world has a chance to start mining on the very same day. And so it is truly this kind of crazy, wide open, permissionless, and extremely fair game that is being put into the world by Zorp. And what happens is anyone's guess. It's one of the reasons it's so interesting and wild is we don't know what's gonna happen.
Justin Murphy:Maybe no one's gonna mine. Maybe a ton of people are gonna mine. Maybe the thing will work. Maybe the thing will break. Obviously, I'm bullish and super excited.
Justin Murphy:I wouldn't have given so much effort and time to it over the past year and a half if I wasn't. But it's just an intrinsically risky, crazy game. It's one of the reasons why it's so exciting. And I think also, frankly, it's one of the reasons why we have a genuinely loyal, active audience base of people who pay attention to us every day, and care about what we're doing, and care about what we say, is because this is a wild and unpredictable game. It's risky and hard, and it's ultimately an experiment that will be decided by empirical reality.
Justin Murphy:So, yeah. You can actually mine on Mac minis. We have no idea what is ultimately going to be the best hardware that's going to be settled by competition on the network. But, at least for when we launch, I'm told by the team that, and it's in the FAQs, that anyone with the Mac mini can take a stab at mining and getting NOx from the NOC chain from the day that it launches. And everyone in the world has an equal shot at doing that at the same time.
Justin Murphy:So, you can't really say that about many blockchains. In addition to the reasons why this feels like a good time to come up for air and reflect on Erbit, it also is a good time to come up for air and reflect on what I've been doing for the past year with Nocturne. Now that they're getting ready to launch, I'm quite proud to share a little bit about what they've been doing, what I've been doing with them. And from here, it's anyone's guess. Alright, I'll keep you posted.
Justin Murphy:I'll let you know how things go. Thanks for listening everyone. Subscribe to the channel, subscribe to the podcast, the newsletter, whichever one you want. Thanks, everyone. I appreciate you.