The Hilbert program was a project to solve the foundations crisis of mathematics, and the Hilbert problems were a list of 23 deep/foundational problems in mathematics. Both were highly influential. The former led to Godel’s work and the realization that the foundation crisis was not solvable (incompleteness theorems) and the latter led to a lot of deep work.
Challenge: What would the “23 problems” of protocol science be?
And are there foundational concerns/tradeoffs in protocols that limit how much they can be formalized and made coherent?