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Thoughts from Trigs about Decentralization, Economy, Philosophy, Tech, and many other various topics.
If this is your first Trig Time, you'll find out I like to start with a mutual understanding of terms and concepts.
So let's kick it right off with some background:
Origin
Greek protokollon (“first glue”) - the first page of a scroll that validated its authenticity. The OG identity and provenance management system.
This later expanded to cover the entirety of all rights, rituals, and ceremonies of diplomacy and governance. It was, in the purest essence, a set of communication & coordination rules that would produce a fair and reasonable result when followed.
It still was required for individuals to maintain and enforce the rules so that everyone followed propriety and got what was deemed fair representation.
Modern Evolution
With the rise of technology and the looming future of interconnectivity, it became clear that we needed to have similar protocols for computers to be able to communicate with each other and get expected results, just like humans had developed for themselves millennia earlier.
All a protocol was at this point was still just a set of rules surrounding communication, process, and coordination that produced an expected result.
Computer protocols allow applications to interact autonomously, enabling more people to utilize them with fewer points of centralization. Most people still rely on the centralized application providers (platforms), however.
Blockchain Protocols
This is where things start to get weird. What makes something a blockchain protocol is still not yet well defined. One clear factor is that it activates the economic layer. Nothing about a protocol up until blockchains ever had any kind of value-capture mechanism. The value created was always extracted or otherwise funneled away by the external actors utilizing the protocol.
This left it up to volunteers to raise funding and partner with beneficiaries to coordinate the development of said protocols. There is no investible path for protocol development.
Suddenly blockchain changes that by activating the economic layer and enabling protocol usage to be tied directly to economic incentives. This is the direction and focus of Farcaster as it pursues protocol-hood.
Is that all it takes to be a protocol?
Added all up, this is my best summary of the evolution of protocols:
A set of rules that enables interoperability (classic Greek)
A formalized set of rules that enable machines to interoperate autonomously across distance, time, and scale (modern evolution)
A set of formal, self-executing rules that enable autonomous coordination among machines, humans, and economic actors— without centralized control (blockchain protocol)
Good catch.
We are talking about blockchains, after all. Should decentralization be a core component of a blockchain protocol? - I would say most certainly yes!
But that's just my opinion, and the debate between a protocol and a platform rages on! Many, many, many words have been written about this, and many more will be written in the future. Of this I am certain!
Suffice it to say, however, that there's another key component to modern protocols that has to be considered: they often have to be upgraded. Upgradable protocols means someone(s) has to be in charge of maintaining and updating them so that everyone using them has a clear expectation of how they work.
This may or may not be a entirely separate thing from a blockchain protocol, but we need to at least acknowledge that it exists and is necessary. Maybe we call it a decentralized protocol.
Well, when looking at the classic definition, the goal is to enable interoperable coordination between two or more parties.
Makes sense.
What about a modern protocol? Well, we all want to participate in them because they comprise the foundation of the internet. Most of the applications we use every day rely on these protocols in one way or another.
Ok, but what about a blockchain protocol? Well, this one is both easier and more complicated.
Easy: To gain access to the economic value generated by the protocol
Complicated: The economic value of a protocol and how it will capture and redistribute that value is not always clear or simple to quantify and tokenize. Every situation is unique, no there is no guaranteed way to succeed.
Right now there are more experiments in progressive decentralization than there are actually decentralized protocols. There are some protocols that have, to some degree, solved for the value capture. Surprisingly few, however! Most protocols are still built and funded by a centralized group of builders with a vested interest in the success of the protocol and external funding that keeps development moving forward.
What's exciting to me in all of this is the idea of creating self-governing and self-funding protocols that enable themselves to exist. This is the ouroboros of technology. Things like protocols can't stay the same forever. They are often never truly complete as they can only be built for what is possible today and remain open to changing for what becomes possible in the future.
Much like my vision for DAOs, I feel that there is a lot of work to do in order to solve for the foundational components that will enable these robust, capture resistant, non-exploitable protocols that can scale. These kinds of systems rarely exist, however. Just because we have the technology to program these protocols doesn't mean we have figured out how to build them yet. And you never know you've failed until the system fails.
"Success" is measured in time between failures.
This is the work of Nearchos. Let's build protocols!
Trigs
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