Farcaster

To be clear, I'm asking the same question, not stating that it is the case.

If I were to digest what I'm seeing:
1. Paying for storage is too much friction to onboard new users but not enough to slow down spam
2. Hubs aren't going to scale 2 - 3 orders of magnitude without a significant change in architecture.
3. The incentives to run a HUB are misaligned and causing congestion instead of capacity

On Hubs

1. We've said from the beginning, people will run Hubs without direct economic incentives. This has proven correct. 10K+ Hubs on the network.

2. This number is artificially high as there are likely many Hub operators hoping for a future economic reward. There will not be a reward.

3. Rewards don't make sense as there's no good way to prove that a Hub was honest and performant for a long period of time. Any deterministic system tied to an economic reward would create an incentive for fraud to fake running a Hub to get paid.

3. This is why Bitcoin and Ethereum do not pay node operators. Economic rewards are independent from running a node. Coinbase ran BTC / ETH nodes for years (pre-staking).

4. Our original goal was get to ~100 independent, good Hubs. Given network size, activity, number of companies building on Farcaster, seems like that number is achievable between 1) companies with an economic interest in access to the network and 2) altruistic individuals for hobbyist or ideological reasons.

1. Paying for storage is too much friction to onboard new users but not enough to slow down spam

> We experimented with free sign ups in a number of countries and rentention was significantly lower than users who paid the $5 to sign up. 

2. Hubs aren't going to scale 2 - 3 orders of magnitude without a significant change in architecture.

> We've said from the beginning we think Hubs scale without sharding to ~10M daily active users, give or take. Scaling is hard, but the existential problem is getting the actual retained users. :)

3. The incentives to run a HUB are misaligned and causing congestion instead of capacity

> There are no incentives? Adding incentives would increase the number of Hubs. The team is exploring how to reduce congestion. Possibly increasing economic cost of running a Hub (since access to the network is valuable). Nothing definitive yet.

See also my cast below On Hubs:

1. Paying for storage is too much friction to onboard new users but not enough to slow down spam

> We experimented with free sign ups in a number of countries and rentention was significantly lower than users who paid the $5 to sign up. 

2. Hubs aren't going to scale 2 - 3 orders of magnitude without a significant change in architecture.

> We've said from the beginning we think Hubs scale without sharding to ~10M daily active users, give or take. Scaling is hard, but the existential problem is getting the actual retained users. :)

3. The incentives to run a HUB are misaligned and causing congestion instead of capacity

> There are no incentives? Adding incentives would increase the number of Hubs. The team is exploring how to reduce congestion. Possibly increasing economic cost of running a Hub (since access to the network is valuable). Nothing definitive yet.

See also my cast below On Hubs:
https://warpcast.com/dwr.eth/0x2d7823b4

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

The result of the first point confirms a bias I have.