Haha no worries, appreciate the back and forth.
I think there are two distinct questions here. Let me unpack them.
1. Why are we considering user numbers in the first place?
In RF4, many citizens cared about capturing user numbers somehow. So we’re starting this mission with some weight given to a user metric. Perhaps there’s a future iteration that includes an algo with zero weight to users.
2. If there has to be a user metric, why are we using Farcaster IDs?
Yep it’s easy to spin up a lot of Farcaster accounts (though it costs $7 a pop, so not a particularly cheap attack vector). It’s even easier (and costs $0) to spin up a lot of wallet addresses. As I explained earlier, we’re simply starting somewhere. I would love to see more robust, non-Farcaster based models get proposed.
One technical point to clarify is that we are using Farcaster IDs as a feature in a model. Every feature gets normalized to 0-1, so the actual number is not the important thing. It’s the distribution that matters. Our hope is that active Farcaster users is a better proxy for actual users than active addresses.
We can also compare different user models side-by-side and see if we think they offer improved signal. For example, here’s a quick chart I threw together (using the test data) comparing monthly active addresses vs farcaster users. There’s a pretty strong correlation between the two metrics, with a few outliers that I’ve highlighted on either side. This means that we could use either metric and for most projects the result would be the same. But for some projects (eg, pods.media and Dmail) the choice of metric makes a big difference. Ideally this is the type of analysis that other community members do and that leads us to better metrics / weights.
Finally, the numbers in the Dune chart you showed seem too low. I’m not able to click into it to see the actual query, but I tried to reconstruct it from raw Farcaster data and I get about ~150K MAUs in January.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not here to defend Farcaster IDs as a good proxy for actual human users. I’m here to say: help us find a better one. Or phase it out entirely.