Reflections on Father's Day
Written in 2018 I became a dad in an unusual circumstance. My wife’s brother died in the fall of 2016. His daughter—Asher—was almost one year old and in foster care at the time. Prior to his death, he and Asher’s mother had agreed to ask my wife and I to adopt Asher. Asher’s mother persisted in this wish after he died. Asher’s dad died at the end of August 2016. My wife and I had graduated college in May 2016, were married in June, and moved to Ghana for a company I was starting at the beginn...
Getting Started With Forge
Forge is an Ethereum development framework. You can use it to create Solidity projects, manage dependencies, run tests, and more. It is inspired by Dapp and has the important similarity that tests are written in Solidity. This is unlike other Ethereum development frameworks to date. It is written in Rust and is very fast. This is a beginners guide. I will go over how to create a project, manage dependencies, and write tests. The intended audience is someone familiar with Solidity who wants to...
The Burn
SummaryIn this post, I propose an update to the Nouns DAO software. Any ETH held by the treasury in excess of total_nouns_count * trailing_N_day_median_auction_price can be burned. The goal of this change is to create a code-level incentive for the DAO to (1) spend the treasury, (2) grow the Nouns supply, and (3) increase the auction price. This change will also mitigate the “risk free value” arbitrage (detailed below). When this change is first introduced, there should be a waiting period be...
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Reflections on Father's Day
Written in 2018 I became a dad in an unusual circumstance. My wife’s brother died in the fall of 2016. His daughter—Asher—was almost one year old and in foster care at the time. Prior to his death, he and Asher’s mother had agreed to ask my wife and I to adopt Asher. Asher’s mother persisted in this wish after he died. Asher’s dad died at the end of August 2016. My wife and I had graduated college in May 2016, were married in June, and moved to Ghana for a company I was starting at the beginn...
Getting Started With Forge
Forge is an Ethereum development framework. You can use it to create Solidity projects, manage dependencies, run tests, and more. It is inspired by Dapp and has the important similarity that tests are written in Solidity. This is unlike other Ethereum development frameworks to date. It is written in Rust and is very fast. This is a beginners guide. I will go over how to create a project, manage dependencies, and write tests. The intended audience is someone familiar with Solidity who wants to...
The Burn
SummaryIn this post, I propose an update to the Nouns DAO software. Any ETH held by the treasury in excess of total_nouns_count * trailing_N_day_median_auction_price can be burned. The goal of this change is to create a code-level incentive for the DAO to (1) spend the treasury, (2) grow the Nouns supply, and (3) increase the auction price. This change will also mitigate the “risk free value” arbitrage (detailed below). When this change is first introduced, there should be a waiting period be...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
I’ve enjoyed using Mirror as a bit of public record of my thinking on some things. Actor Protocols” were an important idea for me in 2022, and so I wanted to publish something on the topic before year end. If only for my own sake in seeing a timeline of my own thinking later.
I think this was really my first tweet on the topic. We were trying to figure out Backed v2, and I noticed there are really different categories of protocols in crypto: those that can be used to ratify arbitrary peer to peer agreement and those that have more of a will: guiding and limiting what participants can do.
To the extent a protocol guides or limits its users, it should be to the end of helping users transaction/come to agreements they might not have otherwise. Creating maximally productive Schelling points.
Some examples of what we can say a certain Actor Protocol “wants.”
I think of these protocols as having been endowed by their makers with some ability to observe change and respond to it: an ability to use information that is often already at their disposal.
Around this same time, I happened to pick up a book I had been carrying around for ten years but never read: The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener. The subtitle is “Cybernetics and Society.” It is the less technical version of Wiener’s other book: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” in its modern usage, and by it he is referring to circular causal feedback, or control loops. Such as a person driving a car: the person perceives the road changing, and they turn the wheel, the wheel turns the tires which turn the car and presents a new view to the driver, and the process begins again.
I do not have the book in front of me right now, so I will not try to do it justice, but he is particularly interested in life-imitating automata that could be broadly defined as (1) having some definite task and (2) being “en rapport with the outer world by some sense organ.” For example, an automatic door is supposed to open for humans and does so via a motion detector. A thermostat is supposed to control the temperature in your house by reading the temperature and turning on the heat if it is too cold.
I could not believe my good fortune in waiting ten years to read this book: until this very moment when I had become interested in this topic. What was so interesting to me is the way in which protocols are en rapport with the world, the sense organ: humans give them the information they need! Often this information is baked into the essence of the protocol: Bitcoin adjusts block difficulty by monitoring the time frequency of valid blocks.
And it’s interesting that this computer/human symbiosis is purely in the digital realm: it is not a door opening for humans or a robot doing your dishes: the protocol recruits humans to provide any input info it needs on its own terms.
So, Cybernetics and feedback control loops offer another, and probably better, lens on Actor Protocols. Along the way I found this great piece from 2020. As is usually the case: someone has already said it, and said it better.
Feedback Control as a New Primitive for DeFi Hsien-Tang Kao and Tarun Chitra This year, we've seen an explosion of new DeFi protocols providing new mechanisms to enable trading, lending, and other ...
Though I think the picture is even broader than what is described in that piece, and perhaps a new phrase like “Actor Protocol” helps convey that. E.g. I would say Uniswap and AMMs are Cybernetic/feedback control loops, but you won’t find them in this article.
I’ve enjoyed using Mirror as a bit of public record of my thinking on some things. Actor Protocols” were an important idea for me in 2022, and so I wanted to publish something on the topic before year end. If only for my own sake in seeing a timeline of my own thinking later.
I think this was really my first tweet on the topic. We were trying to figure out Backed v2, and I noticed there are really different categories of protocols in crypto: those that can be used to ratify arbitrary peer to peer agreement and those that have more of a will: guiding and limiting what participants can do.
To the extent a protocol guides or limits its users, it should be to the end of helping users transaction/come to agreements they might not have otherwise. Creating maximally productive Schelling points.
Some examples of what we can say a certain Actor Protocol “wants.”
I think of these protocols as having been endowed by their makers with some ability to observe change and respond to it: an ability to use information that is often already at their disposal.
Around this same time, I happened to pick up a book I had been carrying around for ten years but never read: The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener. The subtitle is “Cybernetics and Society.” It is the less technical version of Wiener’s other book: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” in its modern usage, and by it he is referring to circular causal feedback, or control loops. Such as a person driving a car: the person perceives the road changing, and they turn the wheel, the wheel turns the tires which turn the car and presents a new view to the driver, and the process begins again.
I do not have the book in front of me right now, so I will not try to do it justice, but he is particularly interested in life-imitating automata that could be broadly defined as (1) having some definite task and (2) being “en rapport with the outer world by some sense organ.” For example, an automatic door is supposed to open for humans and does so via a motion detector. A thermostat is supposed to control the temperature in your house by reading the temperature and turning on the heat if it is too cold.
I could not believe my good fortune in waiting ten years to read this book: until this very moment when I had become interested in this topic. What was so interesting to me is the way in which protocols are en rapport with the world, the sense organ: humans give them the information they need! Often this information is baked into the essence of the protocol: Bitcoin adjusts block difficulty by monitoring the time frequency of valid blocks.
And it’s interesting that this computer/human symbiosis is purely in the digital realm: it is not a door opening for humans or a robot doing your dishes: the protocol recruits humans to provide any input info it needs on its own terms.
So, Cybernetics and feedback control loops offer another, and probably better, lens on Actor Protocols. Along the way I found this great piece from 2020. As is usually the case: someone has already said it, and said it better.
Feedback Control as a New Primitive for DeFi Hsien-Tang Kao and Tarun Chitra This year, we've seen an explosion of new DeFi protocols providing new mechanisms to enable trading, lending, and other ...
Though I think the picture is even broader than what is described in that piece, and perhaps a new phrase like “Actor Protocol” helps convey that. E.g. I would say Uniswap and AMMs are Cybernetic/feedback control loops, but you won’t find them in this article.
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