Maaaan did you guys put a damn token in this thing? If that’s what this is, I don’t think you realize how much this ensures the project has no future. And just how quickly it’s going to turn off a *ton* of people up here, all while ruining the incentives of the very project. Am I reading that right?

There's no token in it. A valid concern!

Completely agreed! The fuller story on our current messaging is that current users and developers of the Urbit platform are most familiar with the technologies involved in our stack, and our messaging is mostly directed pretty narrowly at them. We absolutely owe a more readily understandable explanation to a wider audience and we're working on that. (As well as building demos for a general audience. We've already built an S3-style service that was shared with a small beta testing group). We are extremely busy and are trying to direct our energies where they are most fruitful, as I'm sure you understand :)