Thought about the job market realizing that some problems are considered local phenomena. Think goldilocks zone but for mechanisms. From here we can derive that trying to scale local phenomena doesn't work, because they are local by nature exactly because they are not unfolding well globally, or, at all. So mechanism designers have to have an understanding about whether their problem is a local or rather a global phenomenon.

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Anyone have a contact at @openzeppelin? We'll kick off a smart contract audit soon for @megapot V2 protocol and have gotten in touch with other firms, but can't reach OZ

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Protocol Particles are real

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Protocols are about the invisible hand, the consequences that are difficult to see at first. It's easy to create some rules for the things that you care about. But it's hard to make a protocol work for the system at large, because the dimensions to optimize for may not even be defined.

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Found a super interesting approach to solving stalemates: survivor budgeting. If no consensus can be reached, voting rights are evicted in cycles until a decision was made. Would be interesting to see how this plays out in the real world. https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/survivorBudgeting.php

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what if “RSS is All You Need”? Dave Winer: “This is absolutely the simplest and most web-like way to do federation. And you don't need any new formats or protocols. It's all RSS on both sides. We totally know how to do RSS. It's ready to go. What got me thinking about this a few years ago was Substack. I wanted to publish a nightly email newsletter from what I had posted that day on my blog, but I didn't have the patience to copy and paste and then reformat the text, by hand, when I already have that automated. They wanted to turn me into a computer. I tried that with Medium for a couple of years and it was awful. No thanks. What I needed them to have support Inbound RSS.” http://scripting.com/2025/04/14/121946.html

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This Veritasium episode goes a great deal into protocol security. The world still operates mainly on legacy telco networks via the 2G and 3G standards. It costs about 10,000 USD to infiltrate, locate and hijack any mobile phone connection world wide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y

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Great OG thesis on protocols - Twitter could/should have been ethereum - USV 1st fund struggled to raise - Tumblr --> 20m users w 2 people/founders * fun fact, Christina Cacioppo's (founded Vanta) 1st job out of school was at usv, hired from a blog of course https://youtu.be/RdBsF_JTbLM?si=kQFIm-tj-y-Pm-l4

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"A protocol is a stratum of codified behavior that allows for the construction or emergence of complex coordinated behaviors at adjacent loci." Is this working definition of "protocol" offered in The Unreasonable Sufficiency people's preferred definition? https://venkatesh-rao.gitbook.io/summer-of-protocols

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@vgr does putting a push/pull sticker on a door qualify as a protocol?

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"We can create rules that allow for a certain behaviour to emerge, and we can create rules that force a certain behaviour to vanish." Wrote another banger in the latest Powerlaw Memo. A system is not a system if it has only "for" rules, because then it is a free for all. And a system is not a system if it has only "against" rules, because then it is just a prison.

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notes on protocols, language and cryptography — "People who work in cryptography often talk about trustless protocols, but what they mean is: cryptography scales trust. At the most abstract level, cryptography allows us to replace other forms of trust with trust in math. Or put another way, the trust isn’t eliminated. It just moves to a different part of the system, a part which can be scaled." https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/cryptography-scales-trust

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Who’s fixing this? Tailscale? @quilibrium?

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I wrote about some fundamentals of game design. When you try to reconcile game state, the question always is what is the source of truth, and who should be allowed to control it? Game developers and protocol enjoyers unite!

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colourful contributions https://rodeo.club/post/0x1A076e7A6EE11bC5231351459c6B8f050b92F7Ee/130

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