"All roads to hell are paved with good intentions."

One way of interpreting the above saying is: even when people mean well, their actions or decisions can still have negative or harmful consequences. Alternatively, one can interpret it as: bad actors often manipulate people by praying on their good intentions, such as starting endless wars of invasion to enrich the military industrial complex in the name of security, peace, and democracy.

In draft v0.99 version of the paper "The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols," the authors listed several examples of protocols, which I'll focus on in this short essay:

• Global public health protocols

• Climate-action protocols

The failure of the public health protocol in the response to COVID pandemic is now obvious. The paper also acknowledge this by stating:

"good protocols tend to become visible only when they fail"

This, in my opinion, can hardly be describe as a mere "failure." Throughout the pandemic years, we have seen various nations implement coercive measures that ultimately found to have no, if not negative, benefit to public health. For example, they:

• forcefully locked people inside their home;

• denied access , or, fined people for not wearing masks in public;

• terminated employment of people for not willing to get vaccinated, thereby cutting off their income;

• censored legitimate dissenting scientific publications and discussions;

• used police forces to beat up protesters protesting against unscientific public heath measures

Similarly, with climate-action protocols, coercive measures were being adopted without public support. In the Netherland, the emission cut forcing through by the Dutch government have sparked widespread anger. After months of protests, on March 16, 2023, BBB, the famer's protest won a surprise victory in the Dutch election making it clear how most citizen really feel about the emission cut policies

In both cases, what we witnessed is that such "protocols" were drafted, negotiated, voted in, and adopted by a group of bureaucrats and so-called experts, "on behave" of the people those "protocols" affects. At no point, were those who are directly affected by the protocols given any opportunities to provide any input or a way to opt-out of it. In addition, it is hard to ignore the centralization tendency that took away the autonomy of individuals, the sovereignty of nations, and put into the hands of the international governing bodies. Such "protocols" are extremely undemocratic, pose great threat to freedom of individuals. They pray on people's good intensions of making the world a better place, and carry out covert authoritarian policies under disguise. They often do not achieve stated goals while causing more harm to the public.

To mitigate the issues highlighted above, here are some preliminary thoughts about the characteristics of a good protocol:

Good protocols, like HTTP, TCP/IP, all have something in common. They solve a problem requiring collaboration or coordination without embedding in its creator's personal feeling, ideology, or political view.

A widely-adopted protocol, even though simple in its nature, can be very powerful. Those who controls such a protocol wield substantial power, and such power cannot be left unchecked. The same way we would not want to see the development of the Ethereum protocol fallen into the hands of one nation state, a good protocol should not be left in the hands of an entity with centralized control and no oversight. From experience, one of the good way to avoid power becoming centralized is to have it be decentralized by design.

The adoption of a protocol should be strictly voluntary. No one should be forcing their own protocol onto others, and everyone should have the option to not participate at all or stop participating at any time. a good protocol should be a protocol that the participants willing chooses to adopt, rather than something that is dictated down to participant by some self-appointed entities. It goes without saying that using violence, threats of financial loss, etc. to enforce a protocol should be strictly forbidden.

To summarize, protocols potentially be very power, and we should strive to avoid them being captured and abused by any centralized entities. In designing a protocol, it is important to be aware of potential centralization risks and it may be useful to consider a decentralized governance models. Most importantly, adoption of protocol should be voluntary. As long as we can adhere to this principle, we can just focus on designing "a protocol", and the protocol participants will eventually choose the "good protocol" by overwhelmingly adopting it.

"All roads to hell are paved with good intentions."

One way of interpreting the above saying is: even when people mean well, their actions or decisions can still have negative or harmful consequences. Alternatively, one can interpret it as: bad actors often manipulate people by praying on their good intentions, such as starting endless wars of invasion to enrich the military industrial complex in the name of security, peace, and democracy.

In draft v0.99 version of the paper "The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols," the authors listed several examples of protocols, which I'll focus on in this short essay:

• Global public health protocols

• Climate-action protocols

The failure of the public health protocol in the response to COVID pandemic is now obvious. The paper also acknowledge this by stating:

"good protocols tend to become visible only when they fail"

This, in my opinion, can hardly be describe as a mere "failure." Throughout the pandemic years, we have seen various nations implement coercive measures that ultimately found to have no, if not negative, benefit to public health. For example, they:

• forcefully locked people inside their home;

• denied access , or, fined people for not wearing masks in public;

• terminated employment of people for not willing to get vaccinated, thereby cutting off their income;

• censored legitimate dissenting scientific publications and discussions;

• used police forces to beat up protesters protesting against unscientific public heath measures

Similarly, with climate-action protocols, coercive measures were being adopted without public support. In the Netherland, the emission cut forcing through by the Dutch government have sparked widespread anger. After months of protests, on March 16, 2023, BBB, the famer's protest won a surprise victory in the Dutch election making it clear how most citizen really feel about the emission cut policies

In both cases, what we witnessed is that such "protocols" were drafted, negotiated, voted in, and adopted by a group of bureaucrats and so-called experts, "on behave" of the people those "protocols" affects. At no point, were those who are directly affected by the protocols given any opportunities to provide any input or a way to opt-out of it. In addition, it is hard to ignore the centralization tendency that took away the autonomy of individuals, the sovereignty of nations, and put into the hands of the international governing bodies. Such "protocols" are extremely undemocratic, pose great threat to freedom of individuals. They pray on people's good intensions of making the world a better place, and carry out covert authoritarian policies under disguise. They often do not achieve stated goals while causing more harm to the public.

To mitigate the issues highlighted above, here are some preliminary thoughts about the characteristics of a good protocol:

Good protocols, like HTTP, TCP/IP, all have something in common. They solve a problem requiring collaboration or coordination without embedding in its creator's personal feeling, ideology, or political view.

A widely-adopted protocol, even though simple in its nature, can be very powerful. Those who controls such a protocol wield substantial power, and such power cannot be left unchecked. The same way we would not want to see the development of the Ethereum protocol fallen into the hands of one nation state, a good protocol should not be left in the hands of an entity with centralized control and no oversight. From experience, one of the good way to avoid power becoming centralized is to have it be decentralized by design.

The adoption of a protocol should be strictly voluntary. No one should be forcing their own protocol onto others, and everyone should have the option to not participate at all or stop participating at any time. a good protocol should be a protocol that the participants willing chooses to adopt, rather than something that is dictated down to participant by some self-appointed entities. It goes without saying that using violence, threats of financial loss, etc. to enforce a protocol should be strictly forbidden.

To summarize, protocols potentially be very power, and we should strive to avoid them being captured and abused by any centralized entities. In designing a protocol, it is important to be aware of potential centralization risks and it may be useful to consider a decentralized governance models. Most importantly, adoption of protocol should be voluntary. As long as we can adhere to this principle, we can just focus on designing "a protocol", and the protocol participants will eventually choose the "good protocol" by overwhelmingly adopting it.