Disputes often arise from the interpretability of intent.
In traditional systems, ambiguity creates friction
and incentives for conflict.
In on-chain systems, intent can be explicitly encoded.
A smart contract does not interpret.
It executes a predefined outcome.
#Ethereum #Web3 #OnChain #SmartContracts #ProtocolDesign #Trustless
#ProtocolDesign
If loss is the only terminal state,
the protocol is incomplete.
Human error shouldn’t be punished with oblivion,
but absorbed by a broader logic.
On-chain maturity means designing alternatives.
#Ethereum #Web3 #OnChain #HumanFactor #ProtocolDesign #Philosophy
Lost keys aren’t a bug.
They’re a structural condition.
Protocols assume flawless users.
Reality doesn’t.
#Ethereum #Web3 #OnChain #HumanFactor #ProtocolDesign #Philosophy
It fixes the past,
but doesn’t guide the future.
Protocols that last
are the ones that know what to do when no one acts.
#Ethereum #Web3 #OnChain #Intent #ProtocolDesign #Philosophy
Continuity is not automatic.
It must be encoded.
When interaction ends,
the protocol must know what to do.
Not to decide for people,
but to respect their intent over time.
#Ethereum #Web3 #OnChain #Intent #ProtocolDesign #Philosophy
Blockchains are “immutable.”
Human intent is not.
The real challenge of Web3 isn’t custody —
it’s continuity of will over time.
If code can preserve value forever,
it should preserve intent too.
#Ethereum #Web3 #OnChain #Intent #ProtocolDesign #Philosophy
Average code with well-aligned incentives can survive.
Design incentives as if failure is inevitable.
Because eventually, it is.
#Web3 #Blockchain #Tokenomics #IncentiveDesign #ProtocolDesign #Decentralization #Crypto #BuildInPublic
3/3
this is not optional thinking.
It’s survival.
#Web3 #Blockchain #Tokenomics #IncentiveDesign #ProtocolDesign #CryptoThoughts #Decentralization #Web3Tamil
4/4
"During the workshop, participants from industry and academia brought up topics about #protocoldesign and development. Participants were interested in misalignments between protocol designers and users. Designers and engineers shared insights and lessons learned, especially about the mechanism of data deletion in these protocols. For instance, BlueSky designed its protocol to make data unremovable, but it turned out that users preferred the content to be removable."
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2024/03/19/five-themes-discussed-at-princetons-workshop-on-decentralized-social-media/
Boards For Playful Exploration Of Digital Protocols
Teaching people efficiently isn't limited to transmitting material from one head to another -- it's also about conveying the principles that got us there. [Mara Bos] shows us a toolkit (Twitter,
nitter link) that you can arm your students with, creating a small playground where, given a set of constraints, they can invent and figure communication protocols out on their own.
This tool is aimed to teach digital communication protocols from a different direction. We all know that UART, I2C, SPI and such have different use cases, but why? Why are baud rates important? When are clock or chip select lines useful? What's the deal with the start bit? We kinda sorta figure out the answers to these on our own by mental reverse-engineering, but these things can be taught better, and [Mara] shows us how.
Gently guided by your observations and insights, your students will go through defining new and old communication standards from the ground up, rediscovering concepts like acknowledge bits, bus contention, or even DDR. And, as you point out that the tricks they just discovered have real-world counterparts, you will see the light bulb go on in their head -- realizing that they, too, could be part of the next generation of engineers that design the technologies of tomorrow.
The toolkit she shows consists of boards each equipped with three toggle switches, some through-hole resistors and an LED, a buzzer signaling about short-circuits, and AAA battery holders to make the boards self-contained. These boards could easily be products of a soldering course themselves! Plugging these boards together with ever-abundant RCA cables, students work together in small groups, using switches on one set of boards to transmit data to the other set. She made a video demonstrating how these boards work, which is embedded below.
You don't always need to stand in front of a whiteboard while teaching something -- often, a few custom boards will do the trick, and oftentimes better. We've seen educational PCBs for logic gates before, and when it comes to kits you can hand out for experiments, a whole lot of concepts like snap-together magnetic circuit blocks. If you wonder why all these different tools are needed, remember that we've talked about how education systems can fail a hacker's mind.
We thank [Chaos] for sharing this with us!
Two years ago, I wanted to explain some folks digital protocols like I²C. I wanted to skip the boring stuff; make it a hands-on experience. So I made these little boards that they could use as I/O pins and invent their own protocols to talk to each other across the table. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/si4W3eUqVu
-- Mara Bos (@m_ou_se) April 4, 2022
#mischacks #education #educational #i2c #i2cinterface #protocoldesign #rca #serialprotocol #spi #steameducation #uart
Just How Did 1500 Bytes Become the MTU of the Internet?
[Benjojo] got interested in where the magic number of 1,500 bytes came from, and shared some background on just how and why it seems to have come to be. In a nutshell, the maximum transmission unit (MTU) limits the maximum amount of data that can be transmitted in a single network-layer transaction, but 1,500 is kind of a strange number in binary. For the average Internet user, this under the hood stuff doesn't really affect one's ability to send data, but it has an impact from a network management point of view. Just where did this number come from, and why does it matter?
[Benjojo] looks at a year's worth of data from a major Internet traffic exchange and shows, with the help of several graphs, that being stuck with a 1,500 byte MTU upper limit has real impact on modern network efficiency and bandwidth usage, because bandwidth spent on packet headers adds up rapidly when roughly 20% of all packets are topping out the 1,500 byte limit. Naturally, solutions exist to improve this situation, but elegant and effective solutions to the Internet's legacy problems tend to require instant buy-in and cooperation from everyone at once, meaning they end up going in the general direction of nowhere.
So where did 1,500 bytes come from? It appears that it is a legacy value originally derived from a combination of hardware limits and a need to choose a value that would play well on shared network segments, without causing too much transmission latency when busy and not bringing too much header overhead. But the picture is not entirely complete, and [Benjojo] asks that if you have any additional knowledge or insight about the 1,500 bytes decision, please share it because manuals, mailing list archives, and other context from that time is either disappearing fast or already entirely gone.
Knowledge fading from record and memory is absolutely a thing that happens, but occasionally things get saved instead of vanishing into the shadows. That's how we got IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, which contains knowledge and history that would otherwise have simply disappeared.
#internethacks #networkhacks #internet #mtu #network #packet #protocoldesign
I'm getting back into the swing of working on @i2p proposals (for changing the network specifications), starting with editing and expanding prop 125 which is aimed at improving network performance. Comments welcome!
https://geti2p.net/spec/proposals/125-obep-to-one-of-many-tunnels
Hopefully I'll manage to bash through several more proposals from my backlog this weekend 😊
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