I remain excited about Urbit but am increasingly less confident in the product's ability to serve the world profitably. The market conditions that limit a network OS stack up like cafeteria trays. Or regulatory risks. So far Urbit's product motivation for decentralization makes scarcity on the internet even weirder. If the new Urbit user experience starts from the wallet, and first-class citizens have wallets, who are Urbit's casual users?
These author detailed analyses launched with viki.wiki upon my having received confirmation from the Urbit Foundation to begin research in late summer 2022. I was never told to end it, even after I was informed the grant was illegal. A commercial value scenario was delivered to Galen during Assembly 2022, and others at UF, as a marketing function. Those materials built on research and proposals contracted by Tlon in early 2022 around the Urbit Artist's Residency and Urbit New York.
A namespace is a city. The service of a city is access to the other people in the city. The quality of the service is the quality of the people. The Valuation Bounty 
asked for a detailed economic analyses of Urbit’s valuation on a macro scale. Instead of organizing charts and graphs around a vague axis of cultural missionary work, I sought to candidly reflect on the trappings of economic facilitation and the limits to growth.
Users are advertisers for the system. However, if "the word most associated with the project is 'Urbit', and it's not clear what technically it refers to," this will have been an ambiguity that only recent developments in human trafficking law can compete with.
Maybe that's a dark and pessimistic road to map. Either way, to win, Urbit has to not lose. One way it can lose is against a tough new law with no international equivalent, meant to criminalize tech titans whose platforms allow activities governments decide are a threat to its economic and legislative sovereignty. Another way Urbit can lose is by overinflating the Dimes Square art scene such that the USD $65B global art trade gets sold a less sovereign computing paradigm in the meantime.
The art world is like 100 people. The ultra fashionable Dimes Square art scene-- which like anything ultra fashionable, isn't deeply connected to anything-- is like... 8 people. This is not to sing the praises of international contemporary art, which just like the bleeding edge of crypto, has its own share of regulatory risks. (Just ask Mary Boone).
But there is an evaluative difference between Even Lower Manhattan and the International Downtown. It's the entire 20th century: all strongly connected components resolve with the Museum Mile . This is due to the labors of a large number of people, most of whom are dead, and a highly differentiated workforce. For anything that happens in Dimes Square to be culturally legible, it has to look back as well as look new. Another way of saying this is that communities don't compete. Valence competes.
And if the potential future size of a network is the set of all users less fashionable than the present network, then doesn't that mean Urbit must start with the set of users more fashionable than itself? That would mean looking up to a like-minded circle of individuals and institutions across the globe who are dedicated to the free dissemination of cultural artifacts and intellectual materials . I have a funny feeling that when the people who use those resources overlap with the people who use Urbit, Urbit will probably win.