The Summer of Protocols Episode

Welcome Bankless Nation, to the Summer of Protocols!| Summer of Protocols is an ongoing research and evangelism effort that aims to catalyze broad interest in the study of protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about the world. To explain a little more about what Summer of Protocols is all about, we brought Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation and Venkat Rao of the Ribbonfarm blog on the podcast. Additionally, this episode contains three short interviews with three of the 35 total Summer of Protocols researchers. You’re going to experience something a little different here on the show today. Some more storytelling, a different kind of frontier exploration, but all around the idea of protocols. ------ 🎧 Listen On Your Favorite Podcast Player: https://bankless.cc/Podcast ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Summer of Protocols Explained 12:05 Sarah Friend https://summerofprotocols.com/research/good-death https://twitter.com/isthisanart 37:16 Timber Schroff https://summerofprotocols.com/research/module-three/safe-new-world https://twitter.com/tmbr_ss 1:01:52 Nahee Kim https://summerofprotocols.com/research/re-move https://twitter.com/AppNahee 1:18:44 Summer of Protocols Future https://forum.summerofprotocols.com/t/blockchain-protocol-problems-braindump/223 https://summerofprotocols.com/research/sop2024 1:28:59 Closing ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Welcome, Bankless Nation, to the Summer of Protocols. Summer of Protocols is an ongoing research and evangelism effort that aims to catalyze broad interest in the study of protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about the world. Today on the show, you're going to experience something a little different here, something a little bit more close to storytelling, a little different kind of frontier, but all around the idea of protocols. To explain a little bit more about what we're up to, Tim Baker from the Ethereum Foundation and Venkat Rao will open up the show today. Tim, Venkat, welcome to the show.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us.

• 0:35David Hoffman?

  So this is going to be your guys' show today. Tim, maybe you can kind of lay down a little bit of context as to, again, a little bit more about what Summer of Protocols is and how it relates to Ethereum and what the Ethereum Foundation's role is here. Like, what are our listeners going to experience here today?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. So the idea with Summer of Protocols is to better understand exactly what protocols are and do this across a whole range of domains so that we can hopefully, on the Ethereum side, just have a better way of thinking about what Ethereum is. This sort of started a few years ago now where I reached out to Venkat, who is a blogger and consultant across the tech industry, and maybe in like 2017, 2018, started mentioning Ethereum from time to time in his newsletter. I think the first mention I recall was like the Parity Hack. And so I reached out to him like, yeah, a few years ago, just familiar with his work because I work on Ethereum and Ethereum is kind of a weird thing to work on.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Like, a lot of the frameworks that you have when you're, say, working on a tech startup or something else just don't quite apply, right? Like Ethereum is not like a product. It's not like something where you, like, yes, there is a high-level roadmap, but it's very different in that there's not like a specific team that's working on with a CEO pushing it forward. So I reached out to Venkat to just like, help me better think about this thing. I think when we, when we try to describe Ethereum, we always use these analogies where we're like, it's, it's just like a nation-state, or it's just like a tech platform, or it's like a currency, and none of those are quite right. They all they all sort of hint at, you know, parts of Ethereum and have similar properties, but they they sort of fall apart when you when you start looking a bit closer.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  And so the idea would think it's like, okay, can we like, understand this thing better and and try to figure out how we we should approach it? After doing that for a while, we realized it was a bit too narrow to just have like me and him talking about that. So he he spent some time consulting with the EF and and a couple of us there to think through these things. And in fall of last year, um, we like me, Venkates, Josh Shark, Danny Ryan, um, and Trent and a couple others, published this piece called the Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols, which we were basically trying to define, okay, what what's like special about protocols? And that piece was more a lot of questions than actually answers that we had.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  And and and sort of led us to think like, okay, Ethereum is a bit too narrow of an example to properly understand protocols and like their full breadth. So what would it look like if instead we we try to get researchers focused on protocols directly across a whole bunch of domains? And that's where Summer Protocol started. So last summer, we we the EF funded thirty five people, I think, to spend the summer researching protocols across a whole bunch of domains and in a bunch of contexts. So we had people looking at like traditional web protocols, but we also had people looking at, you know, say, how the protocols die or how do memory protocols evolve over time?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  And that gave us like a really good snapshot of, okay, is there like a common theme, a common element across protocols? And I think it sort of provides a good, a good sort of starting ground to explore this domain. And yeah, Venkates, you effectively ran the entire research part of of this program. Do you want to share a few thoughts on like, yeah, what your expectations were maybe before the program? And then how it morphed over the summer after after we actually had the research?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this was like when we thought of this idea after doing the like just me thinking about it, it was like.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Suddenly felt like I've spent my whole career so far in various sorts of R and D environments of the traditional sort. And suddenly I realized I had a lot of strong opinions on everything wrong with like every other research context, like, you know, university labs, corporate R and D labs, uh, uh, big company product development, government R and D labs. Um, so there was, that was one piece of my thinking coming into this, which is, is there a modern way to do a research R and D program on an emerging topic? That leverages, you know, ideas from open source, decentralized networks, the way Ethereum community does its technical development.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  So that part of it felt a little bit like, you know, there was that old Seinfeld joke where Kramer creates a coffee table book about coffee tables. That's in the form of a coffee table. Maybe this is a dated reference. It's a 90s show, but that's what it felt like. This was a program for researching protocols that was in the form of protocol that turns into a protocol. It's like, you know, not like a traditional R and D lab, not like, um, you know, university research department. All contexts I spent time in. So that's how I approached it. It was like, can we create something that's, a bunch of independent thinkers and scholars and doers, just working on aspects of protocols that interest them.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Uh, and doing so in a protocol-ish manner. So we had these 30 odd people working on various topics. Like Tim said, like, you know, safety in coal mines, how protocols die, uh, how does memory work as a protocol?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Even small examples, like we spent a lot of the summer talking a lot about handshakes, like handshakes are a very basic introduction protocol. What can we learn from just thinking about handshakes? But we did so in the sort of decentralized way, rather than like, you know, academic or industrial way. But that turned out to be a really interesting experience and we published the research in the form of, um, what we call a protocol kit. I have mine somewhere here. So it's a big three ring binder with, uh, all the research published in print. It's all available online as well at, uh, summer protocols.com. Um, and I think I approached, um, this, uh, running this program. Kind of like thinking back in history and what all groups have had really big outsized

• 6:39Speaker 02

  influence in creating entire like, you know, intellectual or cultural or technical movements. So we spend a lot of our sort of meta discussion time thinking about, you know, things like Park, the original Xerox Park that created a lot of computer research, things like, you know, Stuart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog or way back in the 1920s, the Bloomsbury set of writers and artists who created a lot of modernist culture. So we took cues from a lot of these loose collectives of highly influential research groups from which a lot of like important things have started. Tim pointed out the one that kicked off AI. So there was a small conference at Dartmouth in the 1970s, I think, that can be seen as

• 7:24Speaker 02

  almost a genesis event of all of modern AI. So we wanted to do something like that for protocols. So that's kind of the backstory here. And I think it basically worked out the way we were hoping it would.

• 7:34David Hoffman?

  So listeners, as you listen to this episode, you are going to listen to three of the 35 researchers that have gone out and investigated protocols. So you are getting a small snapshot of this much larger movement about understanding and researching and storytelling about protocols. I think this is going to be a really cool episode. I have not heard of any of these things. So I'm going to be in the audience with you, Bankless Nation, as some of these stories get told. I think this is going to be really, really fun. Tim, just kind of give us a preview of what listeners are about to hear. We're bringing on you two, Venkat and Tim, are the co-hosts for this episode, so I am disappearing.

• 8:16David Hoffman?

  And you guys are going to be asking questions to three selected protocol investigators. What should listeners expect? What should listeners like, what kind of frame of mind should they be in as they navigate these three different conversations? Overall, what do you want to say before we get into these episodes?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I'll start by saying what they are. So the three researchers we thought would be interesting to bring on are Sarah, Timber, and Nahi. So the way we structured the program, actually, we had 12 core researchers who spent the whole summer looking into a topic. And then midway through the summer, we brought in 20-ish extra people to come and build on their work. So the first two people we'll hear from, Sarah and Timber, they're two of the core researchers who spent the whole summer working on this. And then Nahi was one of the people who came and like built something on top of their work. And so I wanted to get like a pretty like broad sample of the domains we looked at last summer.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  So the first one, which is Sarah's work, is around how protocols die. And like the death of these digital, so one, the death of protocols, and two, the death of like digital structures. You know, things like video games, online worlds and whatnot. I think this, this is pretty relevant in terms of like a lot of the fundamental questions we had around Ethereum. Around, you know, what should the future of Ethereum be? Should it ossify? Should it stick around forever? And how should we think about that? So yeah, that was one of the topics, just like protocol death that was on my wish list. And Sarah was like the perfect person to spend the summer looking into that.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Then we have Timber, who came knowing nothing about like crypto or not a lot of tech either. He, his background was in workplace safety and he studied the evolution of safety protocols in workplace. From basically people being in mines in the 1800s and blowing up. And sort of derived the generalized theory of protocol life cycles, all of that. And I think, to me, this is one of the really good examples of why something like summer protocols can be useful. Where we have this like case study for something that has nothing at all to do around technology or Ethereum.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And I just remember reading his, his article and being like, wow, like this is exactly sort of how like smart contract development or protocol development works. Even though like there's, there's not even a tangential mention to it. And to me, that was one of the ones that validated that, okay, like, there's probably value in studying protocols at a higher level than just looking at Ethereum or looking at workplace safety or looking at something else. And then, um, Nahih's work is completely different. So it's like a visual piece that's really brings in a bunch of the different, um, a bunch of the different themes and topics that were explored throughout the summer. Um, and like, yeah, as opposed to the first two, which are mostly

• 11:17Speaker 01

  text, it's like a, a graphic, a graphic comic. Um, so I think getting her perspective as well as someone who comes in, looks at everything that's being done and, and builds something on it, uh, is, is really valuable. So that'll be most of the, most of the show. After that, we want to wrap up, uh, with our plans for 2024. So we do have another cohort of summer protocols planned for this summer. The applications are closing for it April 12th. So, uh, soon. And, uh, so we'll, we'll close off saying like, you know, what are we expecting to do this summer? And then, uh, some ideas I had for how to tie all of this back to Ethereum.

• 11:54David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. Well, Tim, Veka, I am looking forward to stepping into the audience, which I think I will go ahead and do right now. So Tim, Veka, the floor is yours. And I'm looking forward to hearing all of these stories.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, Sarah, thanks for coming on and talking to us about your work on death this summer. Um, I guess just to start, maybe, do you want to take a couple of minutes to explain, like, why you are interested in researching this? Um, and then we can go dive deeper into, like, your research throughout the summer. But yeah, just give us some context. Like, why was this interesting to you?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. What an intro to follow. Why were you interested in death of all things? Um, but I started thinking about this because of a digital pets project that I launched in 2021. And they are, um, digital pets that, uh, need to be cared for, like any pet, or they will die. Um, the way that you care for them is by giving them to someone else. Um, I launched it a couple of years ago, like most digital pets, I think, ever. Most of them have died. So I personally felt

• 13:12Speaker 03

  responsible for a lot of digital death.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  And I was interested in building out maybe something to memorialize them. And really, that was where the whole application started. You know where we've gone from there and it's very different. But that's the origin story.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it definitely morphed over time. So I guess let's, yeah, let's dive into your, your piece. So the title was Good Death. At a high level, you're exploring how protocols and digital worlds die over time. And that's maybe the first, the first place to like pause on. Can you, can you walk through how you think of like, what's a digital world? What's a protocol of what's the relationship between the two of them?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So thinking about Death Online, Death in a Digital Context. Some of the examples I was finding were, you know, MMOs that have been shut down or large social media platforms that have gone offline. And

• 14:26Speaker 03

  one of the things that you're sort of immediately confronted by is, are we using the word death as a metaphor? When we say that these things died, do we mean also that they lived? What is the nature of that life? And then in the context of protocols, you know, does every protocol genuinely live or reach adoption enough? And

• 15:07Speaker 03

  I would say no, you know, many people try to launch protocols that don't develop. I ended up calling the sort of liveliness of a protocol or a video game a world.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  So not every protocol grows a world, not every video game does. It is the world that dies, though, when one of these things die. And I don't know that it's fair to call like a video game or a social media platform a protocol. So I would say that there are different sort of base layers upon which this

• 15:49Speaker 03

  live-like entity that I'm calling a world can form.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Got it. Thanks. Yeah, that's a useful distinction. And I think when you you sort of started touching on this, but when you talk about death, there's different stages to the process, right? And even the process versus like the decision of making it a binary thing are two distinct concepts. So do you want to like walk through the death life cycle? If you will, like, you know, what what does it look like for a world to go, you know, to come alive and then to die? And what are sort of like the the boundary conditions there? And yeah, maybe let's let's start at like a high level and then we can dig into like the digital stuff and what makes that particular.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  So what I was trying to figure out, what on earth we even mean when we say the video game died?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  I started looking at what we mean when we say a person died, which is the kind of question you think is very simple. And then you start reading about it and then you realize you could read about it for a very long time. Because it turns out it's very culturally specific. And it's also changed a lot throughout history in different places. To some extent, it's technologically determined. So for example, for a long time in a lot of places, we thought that a person died when the heart stopped. Then we were able to observe brain activity.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  And now in a lot of places, we think of a person dying when we stop observing brain activity. But the way that we tell that the brain has stopped working is you actually observe sort of different symptoms. It's a diagnosis that is made off of a variety of indicators. And they don't all come at once. So, you know, pinpointing the exact moment on this sort of variety of indicators that may be observed in the course of a human death.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Well, we call it a diagnosis, but there's sort of a similar thing that you can observe people doing in the context of some of these digital spaces that we also talk about as dying.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  A follow up to that, the spectrum between physical death and digital death. I guess social death lies somewhere in between because intersubjective relationships that are physically mediated, being in a room with another person, and they don't acknowledge you, maybe they're shunning you, maybe they're like pretending you don't exist or not in the room. That's kind of like a very visceral kind of social death versus being like ghosted or people unfollowing you online. That's a slightly weaker version of that. So there's a whole spectrum of that. But I was reminded as you were speaking of, actually during the summer, one of the times we were chatting, I noticed we were both wearing glucose monitors.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  And one of my experiences with glucose monitors is when I go off a glucose monitor and lose that signal, it's like this virtual identity I've constructed out of, you know, this weird little sensor signal. It goes away and a little part of me died. It's like I feel odd for a few hours to days where it's like I'm more ghostly than I used to be. And then of course, I'm sort of like in habit my body as well. So yeah, can you speak a little bit to the spectrum there of like signals that indicate whether it's brain or heart death or glucose monitors or other people acknowledging you or following you online?

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  So, a few things that come to mind on the subject of glucose monitors is, so I'm diabetic. And I think it's very funny to think about all the ways that I am a digital pet. You know, like, oh, my, my little pocket Tamagotchi is beeping at me that I need to eat something.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  You know, so it is all kind of connected.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  I can give sort of specific examples of what you might look at in terms of a human body dying, but maybe it's more interesting to look at some of the indicators that people have named in the context of blockchains or video games, because you kind of do find something similar. Like, we have this idea of the body as a decentralized system, these different organs, all of which may fail in different ways and at different times, and we observe them and eventually diagnose death.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  But something like a blockchain in particular

• 21:04Speaker 03

  almost has this proposition towards deathlessness. It's certainly kind of part of the claims, which are often made or talked about in terms of their unstoppable and their immutability.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  But it just takes a quick Google to

• 21:24Speaker 03

  observe that many blockchains have died or been called dead. And there are even sort of archives that people make where they track all the dead blockchains, and they list the various symptoms that they observe. So, no market volume, no nodes pingable, no project website. And it's actually very parallel to how we might look at

• 21:57Speaker 03

  A body. And, you know, in terms of video games, there are similar sort of indicators that people debate about on Reddit. You know, like, how many monthly active players? When was the last developer update?

• 22:19Speaker 03

  And so I didn't do the work of codifying a set of death indicators that I personally recommend for any of these particular world contexts. But others are out there doing it all the time.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And I think on that front, you made a really interesting distinction in your piece around archival and death. So like, we have this misguided intuition that like, if you just save all the data from the digital world or from the blockchain, then it's not going to die. And the quote from your piece was like that, the thing that lives is the thing that can't be archived, right? Like, the world on top of it is the thing that's alive. So how, yeah, I guess, if you want to expand on that, and like, how should we think about, like, yeah, the signs of life in a way distinctly from like the digital artifacts that they produce?

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. So we're sort of inevitably and immediately confronted with the idea of archives when we think about digital worlds dying. Because of course, oh, you know, I can just save it all. I can put it on a hard drive somewhere. I've still got it. How can it ever really die?

• 23:35Speaker 03

  And I kind of looked at historians of video games, specifically sort of writing about

• 23:46Speaker 03

  attempts to do this and kind of making a case for how, what is important about that world, about its social meaning, about what happens there, is lost from what I will call the dumb storage approach of just dump it somewhere.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  And I guess this speaks to the truth of death as a metaphor. When we say something died, we mean that something is legitimately gone that cannot be brought back. And in the case of these worlds, if I was gonna summarize it, I would say it's attention and care and the human investment in stories and meanings that we build around these things. And so to give an example of why the dumb storage approach doesn't necessarily do what we would hope that it can do

• 24:53Speaker 03

  is imagine I had an MMO and I dumped the entire game map. And I have all the source code, I can build it and open it up at any time. But what makes an MMO actually itself? Probably it's the other people that I can interact with in there, it's social life.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  And so I guess that's a very concrete and simple example of what I'm talking about as dying.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  I want to interject here since I just watched the first season of the Three Body Problem show. And the plot premise of rehydrating people really stuck out at me. Like anytime the world goes into one of its chaotic modes and everybody dies, they don't actually die, they kind of become like dehydrated. And then you just literally rehydrate them by adding water, right? So it sounds like in your mental model, there's something like what the French philosophers used to call elan vital, the essence of life or water that kind of rehydrates things. But it sounds like you're saying that that's actually wishful thinking and rehydration as such is not possible

• 26:15Speaker 02

  if the original essence kind of vanished and it's kind of like wishful thinking.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Well, I guess I would say there's probably a threshold point for a protocol or world where it can't meaningfully be brought back. But dying is slow and it can be very slow in the case of a protocol or world. So there are definitely examples of platforms or social media sites I can think of that certainly looked like they were dying and then had a resurgence. You know, there are also people who recover from critical illnesses, you know.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  But I do think in a sort of digital context, rehydration might be a little easier. But that's like what the death decision is kind of trying to capture. It's like, at what point is rehydration actually not possible? And we've been wrong about it many times in the context of humans.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  So, you know, our thinking here may evolve in a protocol context, too.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think on that front, yeah, you also have an interesting line around the number of dead people on Facebook, you know, being projected to outpace the number of alive people on Facebook. I think it was like 2070. And this is something I was thinking about yesterday is how long will it take us as like humans to build up good intuition about digital deaths? Like, do we need to have a full, like, human generation live and die so that when you're building something digital, you know, no one building Facebook anticipated that there'd be more dead people than alive people on it when they started? And I think there's similar things when we talk about like these blockchains, which,

• 28:15Speaker 01

  you know, we say stuff like we want them to be around for decades or centuries or whatnot. We don't have like great example of like digital things that have dealt with, if not themselves dying, then like the world they inhabit having like their or the world they create having their inhabitants die. So I guess I'm curious, yeah, do you think there's any, do you think we just need like more time to see like more digital death to build up better intuitions around it?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Hmm, that's a good question. I mean, I think there's definitely a very interesting research direction that I dabbled in a little, but didn't have time to really go down, which is sort of what we do with the personal archive that someone might have generated in a digital form after death. And, you know, I think you're absolutely right that we haven't seen the long arc on any digital thing. And I certainly hope that we will get to,

• 29:26Speaker 03

  while maintaining an awareness that we're living in a very historically novel moment. I guess, in terms... So, one question that I thought about a lot is, to what extent can awareness of death as coming help us design better worlds or protocols today? And of course, we can think about this in a human context, and many people do, but in a protocol context, there are some kind of interesting examples.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  So I know that we talked a lot about the difficulty bomb. One of the other... Some of the other researchers looked at kill switches for protocols as well. And I think there are a lot of maybe interesting experiments that could be done around these sort of checkpoint moments for a system. Because I think... You know, for me, in terms of protocol lifecycle, and I want to be sure to get this in because people are putting in applications,

• 30:51Speaker 03

  is how protocol longevity might be affected by the speed of protocol evolution.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Maybe as in the case study of something like the difficulty bomb.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  And maybe different speeds of evolution are beneficial at different lifecycle phases. There's a lot of research to be done, but something I'm very interested in.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  I want to quickly get your reaction to like three technical potential bottleneck points that look like that. So one is training an AI model on either a human personality or the nature of a world. And then the AI model kind of like reproduces that apparently living behavior. The second is cloning. We've talked about pets dying and we actually talked about our last cat when he died, cloning the cloning him with saving his genes. It costs like 20,000 or something now, I think. And finally, in the blockchain context, I just forking is a kind of cloning like, you know, Ethereum classic in some sense, took a frozen form of the Ethereum blockchain and created like a new version of that life. But we actually do those three things.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Cloning AI models forking.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  AI models and cloning feel related to me. They feel really related. And I guess, aside from questions about consent, like, could a person consent to be being brought back to AI life? What does that even mean? This is kind of a philosophical question to me. Like, where is the self? And what are the boundaries of an individual? I'm certainly not going to pretend to answer that here on this call. But, you know, like, is the AI model the, can it ever meaningfully be the thing?

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Does it matter? Who are we in this Turing test?

• 33:03Speaker 03

  You know, because if if the observer can't tell the difference, does the answer matter? Forking, I think, differently. Um, my mental model for forking has always been um a sort of structure of the universe model. There is a world being spawned every minute where I made the choice I didn't make in this one. And so I feel like forks are splitting universes. Um, not sort of one fork being a sort of reincarnation of another, you know?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  I I have a final question because we're already a bit over time for what we had for this, but uh we're it feels like we're just getting started. Um, I learned a new word reading your piece yesterday that I hope I pronounce correctly. Hyperthymesia, which I believe is the condition of remembering everything and it being a burdensome thing. Um, we've talked a lot about like, you know, checkpointing and digital worlds being alive forever. And, you know, can digital worlds do rehydration better than physical worlds? Um, but yeah, maybe one thing to to close on is can you talk about like? How memory fits into all this and what it looks like?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Um, if if you do remember everything and why that can be bad? And when you have these, uh, you know, potential rehydration points or checkpoints, you know, maybe there's value in like forgetting some of the stuff.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not going to attempt to pronounce. You got it right. Um, it's, yeah, it's a real documented medical disorder where people have, um, perhaps not perfect, but um.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Far, far greater than average memory. And I read a bit about the sort of problems this can cause, actually. And, you know, thinking about archives and deaths, I thought about deletion. And I thought about the right to be forgotten. And I do think, both maybe in a personal context, but also maybe, you know, like of grief and all of this, but also maybe in a broader societal context, there are a lot of examples when forgetting is very useful.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  And to some extent, actually, we need to forget in order to remember. And a lot of processes around memorials are sort of like, oh, taking all of this memory, giving it a place, compressing it. Memorials, I thought of as a kind of compression technology and making it something that we can sort of choose to revisit. I think if I were gonna relate the dangers of perfect memory to a protocol or blockchain

• 36:23Speaker 03

  context, I would definitely think about surveillance. And I would think about what happened with tornado. And I would think about, you know, the changing assumptions about anonymity and privacy and the legal systems that we interact with.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Thanks. Yeah, I think this is a great place to end on. Thanks a lot for coming on. And where should people follow you to learn more about your work?

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Thank you both for having me. My pleasure. I'm on Twitter as isthisunart. My research is coming out with Summer of Protocols. I think it was scheduled for May, but, you know.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  We'll see how fast we can get it out, yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  I'm excited to hear the other guests.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Next up on the summer protocols episode, we have Timber, also a full-time researcher from the SOP 1 cohort focused on workplace safety. So I guess my first question for you, Timber, is how did you even learn about server protocols and sort of end up here? And then we can dig into what you did over the summer.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it was a it was a really weird thing to be a part of because I don't have a technical background. I don't know anything about Ethereum, but I was a longtime reader of Ribbon Farm and I saw that Ben Cat posted the application link on his newsletter. So I thought I'd throw my name in the hat and one thing led to another and then I was a full-time researcher for SOP.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess maybe to to kick things off about like the safety topic, one like really interesting distinction you make in actually two, sorry, two interesting distinctions you make in your piece is one between safety events and non-events and then second between safety and health. So can you maybe just give an overview of like that that framework for listeners before we dive into the specific case study of of what you looked at?

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. So I'm a bit of a student of Eric Holnagle and Carl Wyke in this sense. And safety can be a bit of a difficult thing to talk about because it's not a thing itself. When you talk about safety, you're talking about an absence of accidents and the absence of disease in the case of health. So the whole conversation starts off about being this commerce, this focus on the negative space around things. You're always talking in paradoxes. So if you think of safety as the state where something isn't happening, but you're also at varying distances from an accident happening. So if you're on a ship,

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Approaching a bridge and you're 10 meters from the pole, that looks a lot different than if you're one meter from the pole. Both aren't accidents and on the surface, they look the same. So like every happy family is the same, like that Anna Karenina quote. But then when you're zero meters away from the bridge posts, there's an accident and that looks a lot different. Then you have the event, something's materialized and every, every accident is, is its own. Every event is eventful in its own way. Every miserable family is miserable in its own way. And then with health, health is also a dynamic non-event, but it's over a much longer

• 39:54Speaker 04

  time horizon. So you've got this, this absence of disease, this absence of conditions that you don't want. And you're at varying distances from developing things like, like cancer or COPD or heart disease and you accumulate risk factors over time. So it's very much the same dynamic. You're talking about the absence of things, not the presence of things. But it's over a much longer time horizon and the feedback loops are slower.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Got it. Thanks. And yeah, to make this concrete, do you want to maybe take a couple of minutes to walk through your overview of like the coal industry and especially like the distinct phases? And you know, what, how safety protocols changed there and what was like the benefit of those changes?

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. So with my project, I wanted to study protocol evolution and my background was in workplace safety in the highways industry, but highways haven't been around that long. So it wasn't a good field to examine evolution occurring. So I picked probably one of the oldest industries, which is coal mining. And it's also the most dangerous. You've got a bunch of these different, I guess you'd call them species of accidents and hazards and how we've approached dealing with them over time. So starting with, you know, people picking up coal rocks on the shores of England in the 1600s to the industrial revolution and people using steam engines and

• 41:22Speaker 04

  mining, getting exposed to all sorts of gases and explosions and coal mines. Then you've got surface coal mines in the United States. The world got a lot wealthier, things got safer. People banned smoking cigarettes in coal mines, which is crazy to think that anybody did that. And then you started getting into nineteen fifty's and sixty's where things were getting safe, but not much safer to the nineteen eighty's where all of a sudden these safety mechanisms themselves were causing issues like the detection of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide in coal mines.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  If those systems malfunctioned could lead to people making decisions that didn't make sense and putting everybody at risk during an evacuation. To now in the two thousands where everybody's concerned not about accidents and roof falls, but the leading cause of death being heart disease and lung diseases in the workplace. We've come a long, long way from these pointy explosive hazards of the early nineteen hundreds to today, where it's more health oriented.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Tim, actually a question for you. You've often said that Timbers research reminds you of how Ethereum has had like very similar phenomena where it's, I guess, much shorter speed running, ten year history as opposed to two hundred year history. Can you sort of like make that a parallel story explicit for us?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. So I think in terms of like developing Ethereum, it's a very adversarial environment, a bit like, you know, a mine in the eighteen hundreds or something like that. You know, people call it like a dark forest or something like that. And, and this means that when, you know, when Ethereum launched, they literally almost, they used this like far west mining analogy. When the first versions of the network launched, it was called like Frontier and Homestead. And, and the implication was that like you can build stuff on this thing, but it might, it might just blow up. And, you know, most famously, we had the DAO blow up. Like we had the first successful application on Ethereum in twenty sixteen, raised, I think it was a hundred million dollars at the time.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  And then all that money got stolen overnight. I think that's an example where it's like, we, we didn't quite know how to write smart contracts, theory by then, even like very smart people did not know. Another, another really valuable example was the, the parody hack, right? Like one of the co-founders of Ethereum wrote a multi-sig and, you know, there's a bug in it and all their money got lost. So. We've clearly seen since then like a rapid improvement in terms of like the safety practices and how to write good smart contracts. And we're not at a point today where like, I think you get like extremely diminishing returns.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  But if you look at shipping your smart contract, it looks a bit closer to like a physical infrastructure project than a normal app. And if you're a software engineer and you've never like written production code on Ethereum, this might not be obvious. But the amount of audits that, you know, something has to go through, people treat every single liability or function or every single, sorry, every single line of code or function call as like a liability. Like, you know, do we actually need to like open this whole new can of worms of functionality? Or can we just do something much simpler that we know is safer? And, and there's, there's like this huge, I guess, Timber, you've called like safety

• 44:58Speaker 01

  culture throughout the ecosystem, which to a large extent is extremely valuable, like people don't lose their money. And in practice, you know, people who don't follow this today still lose their money all the time and we see this on chain. And I think the thing I, that's on top of my mind when I, when I read your essay is sort of like the later shift where you have these rapidly diminishing returns and the safety protocols themselves end up sort of playing almost like a net negative role. And, and that's, I don't think we're quite there yet for Ethereum, but it's definitely something where I see we're like following the same trajectory for this, for the, you know, for 75% of the story.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, trying to think about, okay, how can we, how can we like, you know, plan a bit better for the future? And one, one quote, actually, while I was rereading your piece yesterday, Timber, that that hit me was your 200 year quote. So you say like in 200 year, the bar for safety has gone from don't die to don't get hurt to don't burn, don't burn out to you have to love your job. And I think there's something there where like you, you end up focusing more and more on, on things that are like subjective and internal rather than external and objective, like the mind blowing up. And I guess might be my question to you on this topic, because do you think it's possible

• 46:23Speaker 01

  to like maintain a steady state of like safety standards? Or do you think we we constantly try and like move forward and forward and forward? And and and end up creating like a bureaucracy that way?

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, there are lots of interesting dynamics at play here. When you get into this point where returns start diminishing. So on the one hand, when you approach that threshold where returns have diminished on safety and things are very safe, like you've got accident rates that are one per one million or one per one 10 million activities, things are pretty good and they're not going to get much better. So you've got this natural oscillation between people saying, look, we're spending too much. So it's like risk, risk up a little bit. And then something happens and everybody reacts and you risk down again.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  You've also got this problem where everybody evolved to like limit their risks and those that were good at limiting risks stuck around. And we've got this very ingrained in our, you know, biology, psychology, wherever it comes from, but we continue trying to make any situation that we're in safer and sanitize it from risk. And now this is, like you said, being applied not to just physical safety, but what's called psychological safety. And people have very, very different definitions of what that is. One person's workplace that's ideal for them might be way too combative for another person.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  And that person's workplace might be a little bit too welcome and sharing for this, you know, marine that came back from overseas. And it gets complicated because human bodies are a lot more similar to each other than human psychologies.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  When somebody's safe in a coal mine, they're safe. When somebody's safe in an office, that can look a lot different. And we don't have as good of a lens to see biochemistry yet. Like, that's changing. You know, and things that were mentioned earlier in the podcast, like continuous glucose monitors. Could be one tool that you could use to close that feedback loop and make these what once were subjective measures like happiness, maybe a little bit more quantitative and objective.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  To sort of like sharpen that point a little bit, is there such a thing as too much safety? And I'm specifically thinking here about all the Boeing seven three seven crashes and a tweet I saw saying something like, airliners are actually too safe. Like, once you get past the point of safety, you get a company like Boeing that's bureaucratic and financialized. And the actual engineers are not doing as much. So maybe, for example, airline travel shouldn't be that safe just to keep the engineering side of the industry on its toes. Is that like, what do you think about that?

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's very interesting to think about it that way. It's one of these cursed problems where there's a paradox at the root of it, which is that the safer things get, the fewer accidents there are. And when there are accidents, they're so rare and magical that everybody suddenly pays attention to it. And you're like, oh my God, like, look at this crazy plane crash that happened. It just disappeared. We have no record of it, but the plane's gone. Because everything's so safe that what went wrong, nobody could have imagined and engineered for it. So you have these reactions where people are just like trying to chase down these, these wacky problems that aren't worth investing in because it's a complete fluke.

• 50:04Speaker 04

  But because there's this moral dimension to safety, I think people continue to work on it.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  And I, I don't know if there's an appetite for introducing more risk to things like airline flight, even though if in the long run, it would help the whole entire industry become more efficient and choose trade offs between safety and productivity that are a better mix for people's lifestyles and the economy and people's moral frameworks.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  And even the way you you framed it there, I think, has some implication where you said, you know, I don't know if we want to make things less safe, or yeah, if you should make, sorry, you said we should make things less safe potentially. But I think even maintaining a constant level of safety is, is a really hard thing to do culturally, where you, basically the culture that led you from don't die to don't get hurt is like a culture of like proactive prevention or whatnot. And it's, it's kind of hard to change that culture of like, we want constant improvement around worker conditions. And then you get to a point where like, there's

• 51:16Speaker 01

  nothing, you know, that obvious left to do. So you expand all this energy solving for this weird edge case. But yeah, are there examples of like, industries or protocols where they sort of tweak the safety level to just right, and they just left it there and, you know, didn't overdo it, or were able to correct down when they overdid it?

• 51:41Speaker 04

  You know, I don't know if I can think of one, because again, it's just this cursed problem that no matter what point on the arc you're at, it's not going to be good enough for a lot of people. But yeah, really good point that it does level out and that the mindset required in the early days, like where Ethereum is at when things are risky is not going to be the mindset that's useful for maintenance of protocols in the future. Protocol building and protocol maintenance are probably going to look a lot different in terms of the people necessary to do it. Right now, we're talking a lot about protocol entrepreneurs

• 52:21Speaker 04

  in the summer protocols program, but eventually there need to be people that are protocol maintenance experts who are probably going to have a lot more, you know, zen or stoic attitudes towards, towards their work than the dissatisfied people trying to fix things, which, and they're both very, very important. But Rene Amelberti, who's this French safety researcher, has this arc where he shows that early in the existence of an industry, any changes made to safety protocols are generally beneficial because there's just so much wrong. So you kind of see

• 53:00Speaker 04

  this, this arc. So it goes from like great returns to equal returns to negative returns. Then the industry kind of levels out into this pendulum where people take away and re-energize safety protocols as things happen.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  And I think one data point from your, your piece I found interesting on that is when you talk about the work, the minor, the miners, like workplace health issues mapping to the general population, that sort of tells you, you've like, you've like closed the gap, right? Like if everybody's dying from heart disease and the people working in mines are also dying from heart disease at roughly the same rate, it's like, you know, it's, it's as safe as whatever else, like the rest of the world they live in, basically. I don't know, maybe that's like a steady state. It's just comparing the delta with like the rest of the world.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's a great way to put it. There was a study done of the, of mining, spending on mining of the mine safety and health administration in the United States. And the researchers, they were a team of economists, found that if Misha, this organization, reallocated about, I think 25% of its budget on safety to defibrillators and health, heart health screening, they would be saving tons of lives. Like they're at a point now where you've got people working in coal mines that.

• 54:33Speaker 04

  Are, you know, just as safe as somebody sitting on their couch, basically. Like, the risk factors are the same for those two people. And so, yeah, you've definitely hit the nail on the head there. If you look at that delta between in-occupation and what their top causes of death are in the workplace versus the population that they're a part of generally. Yeah, you've, that's, that's a solved industry, one might say.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Follow up to that, what role do you think automation plays? Like, I can see that in some cases, automation takes away the dull, dirty, dangerous, like, you know, commodity pieces. And then what's left over for humans to do looks more and more like everyday citizenship or lay, you know, life. But in other cases, like in COVID, we saw that some of us were lucky enough to work in the background on computers and we were like very little exposed to COVID. Whereas people in the restaurant industry, suddenly what seemed like equally safe as an office became a hazardous zone, right? So like, what are the limits of automation in kind of leveling the safety playing field, I guess?

• 55:34Speaker 04

  I think there, there are two things here. The first is automation is really good at replacing physical protocols. So how we used to detect gas in mines has now been automated. We've stopped using birds and frogs and other poor creatures to see when they stop squeaking. And now we use, uh, machines like stuck to the roof of a coal mine. That reduces the maintenance costs tremendously. But then there's the other part of automation, which is labor replacement in general. So moving people into different streams of work. So you've got these remote workers and restaurant workers to take two groups.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  Where hazards come from? There are two sources. So there's one, there's changes to the environment. You've got things like the pandemic, which you mentioned, and that's going to affect people differently depending on what line of work they're in. If your job has been automated away and you got a new job where you're not exposed to other people. A pandemic isn't going to be as big of a hazard introduced to you. And then there's the other source of hazards, which is the technological change itself. So office workers and remote workers also have a set of risks that they're dealing with, which

• 56:50Speaker 04

  restaurant workers are not. For example, ergonomic issues with sitting with the desk all day. You've got issues with being sedentary, heart disease from that, issues with metabolic syndrome from that, whereas restaurant workers who are more mobile might not have that issue. So automation gives and automation takes away. And it's this, you know, give and take. But once there's these technological improvements, those are kind of locked in. I don't think many of remote workers are going to go back to serving in restaurants unless, you know, AI takes away all the white collar jobs.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  We're almost at time and we've only covered like half of your essay. So we've covered the case study part. I want to make sure we at least touch on your generalized protocol evolutions theory. And this is great because we just had Sarah on talk about protocol deaf. So we can focus yours on the start of it. So maybe two, two questions to kick us off is, one, you use an interesting definition of protocols as patterns of constraint. So if you want to first elaborate on that and then talk about how protocols are like birthed through sources of hazard and then your, your framework around mutating protocols over time.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. With my definition, so protocols as being patterns of constraint on human behavior. Again, I think since I'm coming from the lens of safety, I'm a little bit biased to negative definitions, but protocols do have this, this rules based component where it's like, don't, don't do these things. And not doing certain things is just as important, if not more important than the commission aspect of protocols, which is the procedure. Here are steps A, B, C, and here's the order you do them in, here's how you do it. So for me in my essay, I was definitely focusing on constraints, what not to do and the importance of avoiding certain behaviors.

• 58:48Speaker 04

  In your activities, you're able to do something elsewhere. In the case of safety, not smoking in a coal mine. So you and all your buddies can go have a beer after work later. You're enabling activity at a different loci. In terms of the, the model for protocol evolution that I conjectured in the essay, we talked about death with Sarah, so I won't get into that. But birth, where do protocols come from? And for me, when there's new hazards introduced either by environmental change or technological process, progress, it's our reactions to those changes that generate protocols. And they're the first line of defense. So before any engineering happens,

• 59:29Speaker 04

  when we hear that there's a, you know, H5N1 outbreak in somewhere in Texas, people are like, okay, I'm going to start distancing myself physically from other people. I'm going to start stocking up on certain things. And it's this human behavior based reaction. I'm going to limit my exposure. I'm going to stop doing certain things. And eventually those get locked in through engineering. And they also mutate too. So how do they mutate? You can see somebody enact a protocol and replicate it. You can actually look at a protocol and say, this is how we do it now. I'm going to tinker with it a little bit. Or you can completely from scratch redesign a protocol like a Coorsy Rosenthal box for air filtration has never been done before in the history of time.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  And then somebody all of a sudden was like, this is what I'm going to do. So you've got novel generation tinkering and then just error through a memetic processes. Then you've got selection, you know, are these protocols costly to follow? Do I look weird wearing a mask? Am I going to do that?

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  Is this like smoking in a coal mine? It's like, I kind of like smoking and when I smoke cigarettes, I'm more efficient.

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  Am I that much more productive that I'm willing to do this at risk of blowing up this entire cave? This efficiency thoroughness trade off is. Prevalent in protocol design and evolution and it's something that I look at all the time. In the context of safety, it's productivity versus safety. But in other places, just is this being effective versus are we being thorough? Like for Ethereum, every line of code is a liability, but for every line of code that you add is like a little bit better of an outcome at the end. So those trade offs really pressure selection. If they don't pass the test, then that's what happens. And you end up in the Sarah's domain where you're a dead protocol.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Nice. I think, yeah, we could go on for much longer with this, but we have to wrap up. Thanks a lot, Timber, for coming on. Where can people follow your work?

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks for having me. Always great to talk to you guys. I'm on Twitter at TMBR underscore SS. It's probably where I'm most active. I'm also on, you know, Farcaster and Blue Sky under Timber. There's not many people with the same name, so.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Cool. Well, yeah, it was good having you. Okay, for our last deep dive, we have Nahih. Thanks for coming on today. You were one of the affiliate researchers. So this means you came in halfway through the summer when everybody had sort of in progress ideas and not quite finalized what what their thesis was. So could you talk about like what it was like coming in right in the middle of summer of protocols and how that experience was?

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  So I think that part like jumping in like in the middle of the the all the research already happens like at this scientific middle point is like it was totally different like the than the situation I expect when I submit my application. So yeah, uh, when I submit the application, I had some like plans to work on. But like, uh, once like we been to the retreat and then like to start on the actual like outcome for the individual person.

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  It was, it was more like impromptu, like based on the, like what the actual like outcome would be like from the core researchers. And also there are like a lot of like unexpected collaborative opportunities between the researcher. So, um, yeah, so that dynamic, um, like which was really awesome. And then like affect to my own outcome, like the graphic novel of this project. But yeah, that was like the big difference, like the, yeah, what

• 1:03:47Speaker 05

  then like I expected when I first like start the program. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I, I can imagine. I think most of the affiliates, if not all of them, were people that we chose that had applied for the full thing and we just couldn't fit it in. And so we're like, okay, we need a way to get those people to participate somehow. So I'm glad, um, yeah. I'm glad we got you as part of the cohort. And just a few hours ago, you actually published a diagram explaining how your, uh, how your final work was inspired by everybody else. So I'll, I'll try and share my screen here. Yeah, okay, I think we're sharing my screen, but yeah, do you want to maybe walk through the diagram and sort of point out like, yeah, what inspired you from other people? What did you, what did you take? And after that, we can show the, the final work.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. So the reason why I share this one, like, um, made this one, like, is because, um,

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, so like I told like just before, I made like the my outcome like kind of like a very reactive way, like out of like a like all those interactions I had with the researchers and like some of the like desires I want to achieve in the program. But I think like, uh, like it wasn't that enough to um, like point out which protocols and like which connection like between the protocols. I want to like cover inside my piece. So that was the reasoning why I did like some kind of like a postpartum after the project.

• 1:05:24Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I wanna, um, yeah, uh, like just go through like this diagram a little bit. Yeah, so there were like a some key three uh, influences like I had like out of our literature in the summer in Seattle. So the the first one is like, it sounds pretty random. Uh, but it's it was a like the like some sculpture piece on the street of like in Seattle, it's called Obivo, which was shared by Toby to our Discord channel. So, um, yeah, you will also see a lot of like footsteps in my artwork.

• 1:06:05Speaker 05

  And this was kind of like a main inspiration for me, like to switch over like a total like a visual representation of like what kind of ideas I had like out of the research program. So, yeah, starting from there, um, yeah, I realized that it's just not a I found I did some research about this one and realized that it was actually not a just like a dance step, like it's actually like a a moment like when two people like cross over on the street. And like these artists wanna capture that moment of like a sort of negotiation between two people when they had to cross over to each other like on the street.

• 1:06:48Speaker 05

  So I kind of like I feel like that misinterpretation like has something to do with like how to like we interpret like some specific protocols in a some specific community. So starting from that. Uh, and then like I also wanna bring up our exercise, like drawing notice for, um.

• 1:07:11Speaker 05

  Inside the retreat also. So like note is kind of like a graphical symbol used by um those like old middle age, uh middle ages academics, academic people. So um and Kay and other researchers focusing on memory protocol, like uh preparing this exercise and so some of the researchers participating in like a drawing, like their own symbol like about the overall like their impression about the like program like or the retreat. And I thought that like it's really interesting and beautiful and wanna find a way to use that inside my my project.

• 1:07:54Speaker 05

  So that uh those are two objects. Uh and like the last one was like one of our works, uh work works around the retreat site with Kay. And uh with with Kia and Kia like uh I think I couldn't remember who he was, but like someone mentioned about it's really impossible for a human to delete some very traumatic, very negative memory from their mind. Like for a human, it's almost impossible, like oh like uh that process later like um like strengthen the connection of like that bad memory and the self.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  But um yeah, so that discussion also like progress to like yeah, so to re- to erase that bad memory, we the human may like just have to choose a death. Like so that like just the memory doesn't exist anymore in the person's life. So it's also connected to the death in that ways. And then I was thinking about um the uh Shinori's project about addressable space. So like it's addressable space is there is like analogy between hard disk and like a some buildings struc- buildings structure. And yeah, so like uh when we think about the hard disk, um if we want

• 1:09:21Speaker 05

  To like delete something like from hard disk, delete a file from hard disk. We have to locate the file like correctly so that we can like delete the like correct file. Um. So I was also think see some similarity between like some a person like in agony who wanna delete some like a memory like to uh. They actually think about this bad memory over and over. And the computer's process of like a um approaching a file or your saved object to delete that thing.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  So I, yeah, kind of like wanna um bring some visual representation of like this um some like over at a relationship between memory and death and addressable spaces. So, yeah, I think it's also connected to that forgetting, like mentioned like at the last part of the Sarah's talk happened like a couple minutes before. Yeah, so that's the overall impression. Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Thanks. That was that was a great outline. Um. I can I can also show the full piece. Uh Venkat, any questions, thoughts? I have more questions, but I wanna give you some space.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Of course, I've read the comic a couple of times. It's very abstract, so I had to read it a few times to actually get what you're getting. But one thing that's new to me as you were speaking is um I'm now seeing in the piece the trauma aspect of like memories that are hard to like delete and maybe the only solution is to die to get rid of those memories. Um, I didn't think about that, but now that I was just starting to flip through your comic again. I I can see aspects of um like the that particular challenge.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Do you think it's always possible to, like, the last page of your comic, which is to mature, is like data deleted successfully? Is this always possible? So what's the condition where, what kind of situation is so bad that the only solution is death and there's no way to just delete a traumatic memory?

• 1:11:30Speaker 05

  Like, I think like usually like when someone like wants to like delete that, like some specific memory. I think like it's because it like it's very stands out like from their like whole mind. So, yeah, so it's.

• 1:11:50Speaker 05

  It's very like a counter intuitive maybe, but like I think human tends to like stick to like some like very uh stand out thing like even though like it will harm their mind or body in some like specific way. So um like like I think like even the like the thinking about I want to delete that specific memory. Meaning that like that person like is aware of that specific memory. So like that pointing pointing like action itself actually like strength the kind of like association.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  So I think, yeah, it's like it's totally up to that person's perception about their whole memory um like world, but like in that way, they they kind of made a this really bad relationship with a memory. So like, yeah, maybe like it's also connected to like some parts, some parts like mentioned by Kia about how these protocols, like memory protocols, like were used to remember something better way. But like this bad memory maybe like remember in a better way, but in a like also unwanted way for some people. Yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  I have a final question uh before we wrap up. So I I think what I I love the most about your piece is it makes so explicit the interaction of humans, technology and protocols. Um like there's just so many ways it's it's referenced throughout. So I guess, yeah, based on not only like your work on this piece, but just your your time in the program. Um what are your thoughts on just like the interplay between like how humans huge protocols, how techno- technology mediates that?

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  I think protocol is kind of a like how people first like framing their like a specific behaviors and um technology sometimes can like um enter to human life to make that process more um like process more like gets easier.

• 1:16:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think I wanna like see that kind of like a like tangible and more like a sensible part of this like a hidden structure of human life and the actual human life and then the technologies like engagement into it by like so they're seeing this piece and so they're seeing this kind of like a non-textual, like a more visual focused piece. Yeah, so yeah, that's what I felt in general.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  I wanna quickly-

• 1:16:53Speaker 05

  About those relationships, yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Add here that I think Nahih, you and I were in the session in the retreat on protocol visualization and you described how you visualize protocols as like like a 3D crystal type object and that image really stuck in my head. So this comic book, of course, has lots of other visualizations of a character walking through hard disks and stuff.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Is there another favorite visualization you have of protocols in general? Or maybe a specific protocol like blockchain, like another favorite visual mental model?

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  Hmm, I think the first thing stands out from my mind is arrows. Like, it's, yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 05

  I think it's really like the each protocol has really different shapes from like other protocols. But like the one thing like they share like in general is arrows and like maybe some like a brief symbol like like suggesting how these arrows should like point out, point out something or like be executed in a specific way. So, yeah, that's one thing I can like bring out to like in a general sense about like visualizing protocols.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Amazing. I think this is a great place to wrap this one up. Uh, thanks again, Nahih, for coming on. Where can people follow your work?

• 1:18:27Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, thank you for, yeah, making this place. Like can share about like the things behind the work. Uh, I can be found on Twitter at Nahie, A-P-P-N-A-H-E-E.

• 1:18:43Speaker 05

  Yep, that's where I usually am.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Great. Yeah, it was it was really fun talking to you.

• 1:18:49David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, as we draw this to a close, that was your teaser for Summer of Protocols, but I don't think it ends here. I think the story continues. Venkat, there are there's a plan. There is a roadmap. There are future things to look forward to. Can you give us a teaser of the future as well?

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we are just about to kick off the second Summer Protocols program and we're building on last year's in a couple of specific ways. So last year was like the first time. So we did a lot of exploratory research, basic territory foundational concepts. This year, we are trying to go a little bit more downstream towards, you know, fieldwork, applications, learning how to actually protocolize the world as we are starting to call it. And the mental model we have here is what we're calling protocol entrepreneurship. So we think there's a very distinct genre of entrepreneurship emerging here around working with protocols. And we want to see what we can do to

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  catalyze that, teach those skills. So that's kind of the overall mission of the program. So we've got two kinds of grants. I'll actually quickly share my screen here. If you go to summerofprotocols.com and I'll actually start here. So there's two grants. One is called Protocol Improvement Grants. They are $90,000 for a team of two people to work over the summer to pick an actual real world protocol and prototype some improvement to it and field test it and see what it takes to actually make a protocol better. And improving an existing protocol doesn't mean it has to be like, you know, incremental. It can be, you know, radical. But it has to start from something that that's already there.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  So there's two components to the application. One is you have to post a request for comments in our forum. That's what I'm sharing right now. So it's a bunch of questions you have to answer. What protocol are you trying to improve? How are you improving it? And the other piece of it is there's an application form. And the second track of grants is micro grants of $1,000 each, which we're calling pill grants. The pill is a retonym standing for Protocol inception lore and literacy. So, you know, maybe it's a little bit of a joke that came out of our sense that we were going around protocol pilling people, like getting people nerd sniped and entrusted in protocols and obsessed with going down protocol bunny trails.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  So the idea is if you apply for the pill grant, you get a thousand dollars to, I don't know, write a short story, make a little comic, make up a set of memes, do something to really turn the light bulb on in people's heads about what protocols are and why they're interesting and why you should study on them and work on them. So, uh, protocol improvement grants or PIGs as we call them and, uh, uh, protocol inception lore and literacy or pill grants, ninety thousand dollars and thousand dollars. And, uh, the application deadline is actually coming up in, um, ten days, so April 12th, Friday. So post your applications by then and we're hoping to see, um, good set of like both these larger efforts to improve protocols and these efforts to protocol pill people.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  And, uh, if you go to summerofprotocols.com, um, this link at the top, SOP24CFA, it has all the details. So there's, um,

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  uh, it describes the PIG and pill grants. We have a bunch of partnership programs we are running with a few institutional partners. And we also have identified a few domains and problems, uh, that we particularly invite applications in. So protocols for AI and robotics, climate change, art and culture. So there's, you know, a bunch there that we're interested in. And we're also interested in, uh, what we're thinking of as certain problems that got across different types of protocols. Uh, we talked about some of them in today's podcast, right? Like protocol death is a question that affects all protocols, whether you're running a virtual world or a blockchain, protocol death is a thing. So there's a bunch like that. So some of interest are.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Simplifying complex protocols, lifecycle and ossification, the same topic we were talking about a lot, uh, protocols and patterns of conflict, like what happens if there's a war or cyber war, how does conflict happen on protocols? Um, black swan or long tail events, like exceptional, rare catastrophic events, there was just an earthquake in Taiwan, what role do protocols play in that? So that's some of the themes we want to focus on. So yeah, uh, really looking forward to uh, going through all the applications. And if you're listening and you'd like to apply it, throw your hat in the ring.

• 1:23:25David Hoffman?

  If I could just add some of my own commentary here, we frequently talk about um, front-running the opportunity on bankless and really, it's really like trying to ready our audience for the future, future-proofing bankless listeners. And I think maybe one of the efforts here is is somewhat similar. We are trying to encourage protocol fluency because we are entering into a wage age in which the scale of humanity uh, is fit for protocols beyond that are internet scaled and beyond, right? Uh, and Tim, you're talking about just how like, um, there's just like a whole entire new subdomain of developers and entrepreneurs who are building protocols because that is the new frontier of entrepreneurialism, the

• 1:24:08David Hoffman?

  digital age, Silicon Valley, kind of everything, right? Like, this is what the VC industry is like looking towards because that's where all the opportunity is. How would you connect all of this back to Ethereum as some of the original Ethereum like researchers or the original people who think in protocols? Uh, just bring us back home with this, Tim.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  My grand hope for this is if we can solve things at the level of protocols in a general class, then solving for Ethereum becomes a bit easier. Like, one analogy we often use to think about this stuff is complexity theory. If you look at like complex systems, you know, you can look at a set of living organisms or at like a, a mechanical model and have like the same fundamental theories that you use to analyze, you know, some, those systems. And ideally, we can eventually be in a world where Ethereum is just, you know, an instance of a protocol and we have a really good body of work and thinking around how do we reason about protocols. So I think this is the long-term vision here. To get there,

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  obviously, we have to make incremental progress. And I think a lot of the themes that Venkat just brought up applied with Ethereum and are things we'd be interested in funding people to research over the next year. I wrote a post on the summer protocols forums about this, but at a high level, you know, stuff we talk about in the Ethereum community all the time are what should we keep within or outside of the protocol? We call this enshrinement, but just, you know, what should be internal versus external protocol functionality? Vitalik has written a bit about this, so there's some good starting points for people wanting to look in that more deeply. I think the, probably the most storny one is complexity management. So this whole idea of like,

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  can we simplify protocols? What happens when like, protocols have to serve a bunch of different users and simplification just isn't compatible with that? Does it means we always have to create like these weirder and weirder edge cases? Or are there better ways to designing protocols than that? And then the last, this is probably the like, you know, millennium prize for blockchains, is the whole question of ossification, right? There is a trade-off between having a protocol that's adaptable and that can react to the world around it and having a protocol who makes assurances about the world on a long time scale. And the extent to which we're willing to adapt

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  this protocol sort of degrades the extent to which those commitments are credible on a long time scale. So what's the right, you know, strategy here? What's the right mental model? I think one thing I'm particularly unhappy with is even when we use the word ossification, it's like a word we brought over from Bitcoin that has all these connotations and all these implications around like, what the solution space should be like. We started using endgame a bit more. Ethereum space. So at least that's a bit more homegrown. But I think, yeah, can we think about this in like a more practical way rather than just reasoning through analogies and memes and, and see if there is a path to like a long-term, a healthy strategy for Ethereum. So yeah,

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  those are all the types of questions we're looking to to address here. And those are Ethereum specific. But again, SOP is not restricted to that, as people heard with the researchers today.

• 1:27:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And really, just to plant this flag, this is an initiative that is just starting. And this is something that will iterate and continue for the foreseeable future. So this is the introduction to the Bankless audience and the listenership about some of our protocols. But this is, this is going to be a thing moving forward, right?

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Yes, hopefully so. And again, if you think of it as like an academic discipline, the goal is that over time, it's not, it's not something just me and Venkat have to push forward with like a bunch of researchers, right? Like if you think of like economics today or maths today, it's like a whole field of study. And protocols are probably smaller than that as like a field, but that's the goal. It's to like, highlight this as an important thing worth studying and thinking about, seeding some interesting research and like interesting rabbit holes for people to go to go and explore, and ideally bringing on more partners and more institutions who are also interested by these questions and can help kind of push this entire field forward.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  And quickly to add to that, yeah, the way we see this happening is push more and more towards more partners, more working in public. So last year, we had a lot of activity in our Discord. This year, we are making a special effort to use our discourse forum, which is more publicly visible. So we kind of want to like, spark a culture of lots of activity happening a lot of places, not just this one program sponsored by the EF. But yeah, we'd love to see seeds of protocol studies and protocol science being planted all over the place.

• 1:29:05David Hoffman?

  Well, Venkat, Tim, I'm looking forward to what blossoms out of this initiative. I think this is a fantastic way to nerd snipe a bunch of people to think differently and to think bigger and think in protocols. So thank you for helping kickstart that movement here today on the show.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having us. This was great.

• 1:29:20David Hoffman?

  Cheers.