GroundWire: Relaunching Urbit Identity on Bitcoin, with Nostr Applications
Urbit is a 20-year project to reconstruct the computing stack on principles similar to Bitcoin's with respect to money: permanence, simplicity, self-sovereignty, and Internet/P2P-first architecture. Since 2016, its networking protocol has included a global identity layer using blockchain consensus. Unfortunately, due to perceived technical limitations at the time, that consensus has been Ethereum's. GroundWire is a "UASF" of this identity layer and networking protocol, enabling Urbit nodes to discover each other and attest their encryption keys on the Bitcoin timechain using an extension of the ordinals protocol. Maintaining these nodes' ability to communicate with existing nodes - hence a "soft fork" - has had the promising side effect of creating a very simple avenue for Nostr integration that would enable Nostr users to take advantage of features like key rotation, relayless discovery and data persistence, and spam resistance that have thus far been issues for that network.