For those confused about Urbit's value proposition, I recommend Isaac Simpson's briefish explanation here. Funny enough, the original version was posted behind Medium's membership paywall, and the public link was just recently distributed:<p><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20so%20dark%20future%20-%20isaac%20simpson.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20s...</a><p>My own perspective regarding these new decentralized platforms is that we're at the very tail end of low-hanging fruit in regards how easy the next generation of software innovation will be to explain to "your average layperson". The problems that decentralization are trying to solve are uniquely understood by developers, particularly people well-versed in the metagame of content, advertising, identity, and privacy on the web, which is a vast field filled with thousands of great reasons to consider decentralization, but are unfortunately hard to distill down into a 30-second elevator soundbyte.<p>Another problem is that having high-density conversations about software innovation is fundamentally absurd. Every software innovation is ultimately just "another way to write code", so you can boil down everything Urbit and IPFS and Ethereum are doing to "well, our current code for everything is this way, and it seems to suck, so we're going to try writing the code a completely new way". That's it. Every time someone asks "what can you even do with this thing?", the answer is "well, you can develop software on it".<p>Edit: Apparently the original article has been un-paywalled. Perhaps you can access it here:<p><a href="https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future-of-the-internet-400c9b667e2" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-f...</a>