protocols

protocols

a place to discuss protocols and protocol design

xh3b4sd ↑ pfp

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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xh3b4sd ↑ pfp

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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ȷď𝐛𝐛 pfp

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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xh3b4sd ↑ pfp

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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Papajams pfp

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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Jacob pfp

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

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xh3b4sd ↑ pfp

"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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agoston nagy pfp

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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Darryl Yeo 🛠️ pfp

Darryl Yeo 🛠️

Who’s fixing this? Tailscale? @quilibrium?

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xh3b4sd ↑ pfp

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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agoston nagy pfp

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

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Anuraj R pfp

TIL - QR code is a Japanese invention Great video about QR code protocol and its history showing more than 150 years of protocol evolution starting with Morse Code https://youtu.be/w5ebcowAJD8

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na pfp

https://mqtt.org/

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Jacob pfp

@vgr is there a better protocol than those combination lockers that let anyone set their own code if they're open?

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Kyle Mathews pfp

@vgr is there a pdf of all the protocols essays? I've been playing with https://notebooklm.google/ and it's quite handy to have a canonical set of resources to insert a specific block of knowledge. I have a notebook I want to mix-in all the protocol ideas.

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