Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

The skiff situation is a good reminder of why decentralized ecosystems are so valuable.

Challenge question @dwr.eth @v : how far along is Farcaster in this regard? If hypothetically your team got acquihired by Facebook (or Tencent, or...) tomorrow, how well would the ecosystem be able to keep going?

assume malicious acquirer. for ecosystem to survive intact would need: 

1. decentralized contracts
2. decentralized hub network 
3. easy to use client with 80% warpcast parity
4. good steward for protocol governance.

decentralized hub network

i'd give us a 5/5. works very well right now, several hundred hubs running in production. easy to understand codebase etc.

easy to use client 

i'd give us a 1/5 right now. lots of teams working on this, but still early. if warpcast disappeared tomorrow, it is plausible that a lot of users would churn before a replacement emerged.

good stewards

i'd give us a 2/5 here. we have the talent but not the governance process to ensure that decisions happen with high quality and speed. 

fixable problem, but isn't fixed today.

decentralized contracts

i'd give us a 4/5. would be able to decentralize control in a day or two.

problem is (4) or finding the right stewards

This is the technical pov. 
Business pov: If you have the client 99% of the users use, you *are* the protocol. You can break anything you like, hard fork hubs, change contract addresses, etc. and users will either not notice, or won't be able to do much.

It's all about #4, I've yet to see a strong success story?