Through the summer of the agreement: the imagination of encryption technology from the humanistic perspective

Author: Fang Ting, Source: Crooked Neck Three Views

Summer of Protocols (Summer of Protocols) is the first pure humanities and social science research project sponsored by the Ethereum Foundation. The core contributors of Ethereum draft the basic documents, Vitalik and others provide opinions, and the project researchers will jointly form the final results. Full-time and part-time researchers will receive unconditional funding for different periods of time to complete research projects. The selected researchers include academic professors, sponsors of scientific research funding funds, and serial successful entrepreneurs in the field of marine science and technology. The research project is centered on the "protocol", and the topic is freely chosen by the researchers, and it does not need to be related to Crypto, and the final results will all be open source.

01 Diegesis: The Wide Angle Gaze of Technology

**Blockchain users share an unexpected similarity with "Naturalists": they are both in a kind of low-prompt/no-prompt serenity. **The emergence of new technologies is often accompanied by many designs intended to suggest their functions, which makes life after the industrial revolution somewhat too noisy: even if we are surrounded by still life, we are also in the noise of all aspects of technology at the same time. Man-made objects "remind" their mutual functions all the time: the mirror reflects light, the power supply flickers, the refrigerator is always low temperature, and self-declares thousands of functions in silence. When the "unprompted" technical architecture appears, it often takes a lot longer to find a location for it: And the result is usually not that the location is found, but the drawing is modified.

The history of science and technology is a long "One Thousand and One Nights", and the emergence of blockchain based on cryptography is such a story chapter: it is empty, without a word, it is a piece of paper without size and thickness ("This page intentionally left blank") with a ruler that everyone can draw a line on when they pick it up. The interior of the "story" is not filled with words, it is empty, but it cannot be said that there is nothing, but just the complement of the empty, that is, a space itself with its own rules. **In general, it is a completely passive technology. **

We don't often hear the concept of "world" at the beginning of a certain technology, and not all new technologies can be reminiscent of "narratology", but the simplicity of the blockchain story makes people think of narrative The concept of world (diegesis) in science. This is also the "autonomous world" proposed by **Ludens in "Blockchain-Based "Autonomous" World" **, this concept is now more associated with "fully on-chain games" (FOCGs) . What it emphasizes is precisely the "empty" part of this technological story, that is, the autonomous part that can operate by itself through a series of digital physical rules. The shape of the space itself is greater than the internal load. Therefore, the "autonomous world" is more "relational" than "entity" in terms of what the blockchain can achieve. Furthermore, this is exactly why Ludens finally proposed "interobjective realities" (interobjective realities, that is, objective consensus reality shared by many people), even though this concept is not mature, nor does it have any know-how meaning of the tutorial.

This is exactly why there is a "Summer of Protocols": As one of the researchers, when I knew that the Ethereum Foundation was willing to spend more than funding a specific project to fund our "no code at all" Humanities and social science research, what I think of is: We finally stopped on the roadmap, and started to stare at this abstract technology with an equally abstract attitude.

The above paragraph is a joke (obviously), but it is undeniable that "taking a few steps back" is a necessary redundancy - Ethereum is moving from "world computer" to "digital future", and some practitioners are moving from mines to Zuzalu, as well as at the industry level, from the "Summer of Defi" to the "Summer of Protocol", our on-chain world took three to ten years. Reimagining the rules of the new space (digital space) we have acquired, and in the form of "agreement", is a very bold experiment: the word "protocol" may (and probably is) a straw man fallacy, its verbal depth It may not be able to carry the value that all research topics want to discover. And its core researchers may have a completely opposite understanding of the term. There are no established assessment standards, and there are no articles that must be written and peer reviews that must be passed. There are just endless "spaces where conversations happen."

That's the fun part of this big game.

(The inevitability or accident of failure is not important. After all, any philosophical conclusion is a series of failures when viewed from the internal intellectual history.)

The series of articles will start from the published Pilot Study (pre-research), introduce the existing eleven research projects and their sub-topics (including the projects I will participate in), and add some derailed/jumps when necessary Orbital views, and unexpected fun events that occurred throughout the research experiment.

02 Pilot Study: The Extraordinary Sufficiency of "Agreement"

This dissertation is the starting point and cornerstone of the research project. The original title is "The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols" (for why this title is, you can refer to the explanation in the second half of the original text below), and the text is written by Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Danny Ryan, Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, Bastian Aue , with suggestions from Hasu, Micah Zoltu, Matt Garnett, Vitalik Buterin, Ben Edgington, Alex Stokes, and Josh Davis.

As a basic document of the research project, it introduces the origin of the "Summer of Protocol" project, and makes some initial attempts on the definition and characteristics of "protocol". The research results in the process are constantly added, deleted and adjusted, so it is a dynamic document. **

The translation of the first section of the full text is as follows: (ChatGPT4 made the main contribution, the court retrial)

一 Introduction: Concept selection and working definition of "protocol"

Complex coordination problems seem doomed to intractability—we talk in pessimistic terms about economics as a “gloomy” science, social phenomena are dominated by “tragedies of the commons,” organizations are hopelessly captured, complex problems become Get tricky. Even our studies of the simplest mental models of coordination and cooperation problems, such as the prisoner's dilemma in game theory, are haunted by significantly poorer outcomes, and worst-case behaviors that drive systems away from expectations.

In practice, however, we are often able to solve coordination problems fairly well. **Practicable solutions emerge through the gloom and doom that so often accompany theory and cultural commentary. **Given this, these surprisingly good results are almost suspiciously lucky, or chance. Just to name three examples:

• Traffic consists of millions of objects, each weighing several tons, traveling at high speeds in close proximity to each other. Yet traffic flows fairly safely thanks to a relatively simple set of rules, starting with the agreed-upon side of the road for driving.
• There are a wide variety of dangerous pathogens in our environment, however, the simple handwashing method popularized by Joseph Lister, i.e. thorough handwashing with antiseptic, has proven to be very effective and arguably more advanced than many Medical technology is a more important factor in managing infectious diseases.
• Billions of transactions involving sensitive information are carried out on the public Internet every day, yet the vast majority of transactions are successfully completed thanks to reliable packet-switched networks and secure public-key cryptography.

Two Working Definition of Protocol

Each of these simple examples contains one or more protocols. **Protocols are relatively simple and fixed sets of behaviors that, when adopted by enough actors (humans and/or AI) in a certain situation, reliably lead to good enough outcomes for all. **

These good outcomes from agreements are often achieved in the face of some impactful default, free-riding, and other patterns of bad behavior. While agreements can fail, and do fail - the Kyoto climate agreement being a notable recent example - what is really significant is that more often than not they do not slide towards the expected failure. **

Well-functioning protocols not only solve nominal problems but also catalyze creative flourishes around the activities regulated by those protocols. For example, reliable and trustworthy "land title agreements" can often unlock significant economic prosperity by "allowing private land to be used as collateral for capitalist investment". In the public domain, good environmental management protocols can bring endangered species back from the brink of extinction and restore fragile ecosystems.

Yet precisely because they become invisible backgrounds when they work, good agreements often only emerge when they fail, reinforcing a pessimistic view of the problem domain they solve. For example, prior to the Covid19 pandemic, few people knew of the existence of global public health protocols that had successfully curbed the spread of other infectious diseases in the preceding years.

Three The "surprise surprise" of the agreement

In many cases, a "protocol" is enough to turn a seemingly impossible problem into a tractable one. And, any residual disagreement or uncertainty is well within the problem-solving capabilities of ordinary humans. Surprisingly, agreements often carry collective problem-solving behavior from the "tragedy of the commons" to those regimes of serendipity. As they evolve, good agreements tend to meet the standard articulated by Milton Friedman: they "have positive effects even when the wrong people do the right thing." Agreements do not depend on extraordinary Rather, it enables ordinary, fallible individuals to find workable solutions while controlling the effects of vice or folly.

In some cases, all that is needed to establish good protocols is the identification and dissemination of good solutions that can be easily replicated. For example, in the classic Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD, Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma), the well-known "tit for tat" and its derived strategies solve the dilemma simulated in the original game and establish mutual cooperation as an evolutionarily stable strategy. While this strategy usually occurs naturally in natural environments and is established by natural selection, it can also be established by design as a formal agreement. The normalization and formalization of such good solutions, whether technically enabled or not, is usually at the core of a "good" agreement that is both attractive to participants and sufficiently adaptable to the evolutionary environment.

four what is a good agreement

A good protocol not only treats the solution to a problem as a work in progress (resolving bugs and imperfections with a long-term perspective), but also treats the problem itself as a work in progress. The creation, growth, and expansion of good protocols often catalyze mature responsibility management and ensure sustainable generation at the same time. On the other hand, bad protocols, if they survive the early days, tend to be more and more ignored over time, leading to long periods of impoverishment and stagnation, and eventually capture and corruption. Deep problems are patched by those on the surface, making the whole more and more fragile.

However, as we argue later in this paper, bad protocols are often under sufficiently strong evolutionary pressure that they tend to be replaced by better protocols. While it is important to resist the temptation to overstate the technical optimism—highly adaptive bad agreements do exist, and can persist over time and cause lasting damage—it is reasonable to argue that agreements are the natural engine of progress, and historical logic usually Prefer good agreements (both in terms of values and evolutionary sense) to bad agreements.

In short, good agreement is the embodiment of A. N. Whitehead's famous statement: ** "The progress of civilization consists in expanding the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking."(" civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”) **Good agreements not only bring about the advancement of civilization, but do so in a sustainable manner. "Stability without stagnation" (a guiding principle of the Rust programming language) is the state that good protocols aspire to, and surprisingly, they are often able to achieve and maintain it long enough to generate and consolidate significant civilizational progress.

5 **What is "extraordinary sufficiency"? **

The title of this article (Pilot Study) was inspired by Eugene Wigner's classic 1960 essay "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". The essay established not only a template for an evocative title that inspired many a "Snowclone," but also a pattern of finding the unexpected: the otherworldly, uncanny end result compared to the original naive expectations. Performance.

While the various agreements vary in their effectiveness, their distinguishing feature is their unusually extraordinary "sufficiency". Relative to their size and complexity, they solve more problems and are more complete than we expected. In short, good agreements catalyze good-enough outcomes across competing criteria, and do so with fairly limited intervention.

Thus, although the culture around established agreements is always full of ritualized complaints, they inspire enough voluntary commitment and participation to overcome the centripetal force of departure and exit and establish a center of continuity and history. Good agreements tend to form persistent Schelling points in problem spaces worth solving around solutions that are good enough—at least for a while. Surprisingly, they are often able to induce more complex patterns of voluntary commitment and participation than centralized coordination systems.

6 "Protocol" as a future first-level concept

The purpose of this paper (Pilot Study) is to highlight this salient feature of the protocol, provide a conceptualization and explanation of the nature of the protocol, and propose an initial agenda for exploration. Our goal is to help accelerate, broaden, and structure the conversation about protocols, and to this end, we invite readers to critically critique and challenge the initial ideas presented here.

Through this article, and the broader Summer of Protocols initiative it belongs to, we hope to help catalyze a broader, deeper, richer, and more optimistic conversation about all aspects of protocols, from the highly technical from mathematics to society, politics and culture. We believe that "agreement" should be a first-class concept in any discussion of coordinated co-creation phenomena, from the "handshake" to every aspect of the future of civilization. We believe that protocols at the computer level, in particular, will play an increasingly important role in all aspects of modern human life. Our knowledge, capabilities, and imagination of protocol-based futures will determine whether those futures are good or bad.

It grew out of a three-month discussion in one corner of the Ethereum community about the nature and future of the protocol, and is intended to convey an atmosphere of ongoing, evolving conversation that we hope to expand. As participants and stakeholders in the Ethereum ecosystem, we are naturally particularly interested in protocols based on computing technology (especially cryptographic computing technology) and the cryptoeconomic ecosystem they give rise to. While our exposition is necessarily influenced by the Ethereum project's history, current priorities, and long-term vision, we have attempted to explore the protocol's world broadly in the hopes of being generally beneficial to all protocol learners. No specific technical knowledge is required here to follow the discussion that follows, just a broad technical and cultural curiosity.

The rest of the pilot study is organized as follows:

In Section II, we provide a working definition of protocols, briefly distinguishing them from adjacent concepts such as standards, APIs, and social conventions, and initially identify a set of interesting questions about protocols;

In Section III, we explore ten aspects of the protocol in depth, focusing in particular on aspects of "superior sufficiency" that we identify as key gestalt features;

In Section IV, we briefly survey some cutting-edge issues in state-of-the-art protocols;

Finally, in Section V, we provide a thumbnail image of a Protocolized Future that we believe is worth working towards.

For the translation of the full text of the Pilot Study, please see:

03 P*rotocolized: live well under the agreement**

The above-mentioned prior studies may inspire us mainly from this quote—"The progress of civilization consists in expanding the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking." This sentence explains why the researchers chose " The word "protocol" is the central analysis object: the protocol is an automation device in the sense of social science, and it is also a core device for the automation of the mechanical level to gradually deepen into the automation of more internal human cooperation in the history of accelerated development. Contains resistance to the unbalanced distribution of decision-making weights in the current social structure.

A good protocol is a well-weighted network in which every node's interaction follows the path of least resistance. In order to prevent readers from overcomplicating this vision and thereby affecting the optimistic state of collaboration, the authors of the paper made a promise at the beginning of the paper, and this promise is also used throughout the whole text: the "protocol" has a more sufficient Coordination ability, that is, having "extraordinary" sufficiency.

**People must not walk into that promised future together, just like marching into the golden world. **The digital world is not flatter than reality, the process depends on how we collaborate (protocolized). Based on the assumption in the original text, what we need to be firm is not the belief in the agreement itself, but the belief in each other: we can live well under a certain agreement, just like we can survive under the blue sky. Welcome to the digital world with a shorter viewing distance, and jointly survey and map on this huge draft paper. The New World that used to be on the coast is now in the clouds.