As a technical experiment, that's fine. For timing speculation, okay. In the competition for the natural monopoly of private liquidity, 0.00001% more risk on one side than on the other pre-determines the outcome.
When you put it in that context, doesn't the increasing uncertainty surrounding the code base and recent events pretty much disqualify both BBR and XMR from holding that title? At what point will you and other stakeholders decide your money is better spent recreating the technology from scratch?
Certainly that has been considered. But bootstrapping a competitor would destroy existing value. It's immoral, and it's a defection strategy. That makes it risky. If you just forked, it would probably take USD $30mm or more to compete with XMR. If you required a fresh codebase, it would take longer, and XMR value would grow in the meantime. You might require in excess of $200 mm by the time you were market-ready. It's a very expensive crap-shoot.
if for whatever reason he resisted that and wanted to stay in control alone, I believe that would be the end of BBR.
Right. So depending on the timing:
1) now - BBR achieves its best feasible growth with CZ the strong leader of a doxxed team with the ability to enforce open process
2) later - BBR is dragged down, but eventually gets a fair shake, after market position has deteriorated
3) never - BBR is dragged down forever
(1) seems unlikely.