Monoliths, Decentralization, Robust Protocols, and Sufficient Interoperability

An attempt at mapping the concepts to the protocol flexibility vs cultural adaptability 2x2:

(1) Adaptive-Experimental: “Sufficient interoperability” + “The key is to minimize interoperability constraints to maximize self-maintained nodes.”

(2) Adaptive-Experimental: “Nodes light enough to be few-shot learned by a new user by observing input/output behaviors of existing users, and subsequently maintained by the user, can be called self-maintainable nodes by analogy to self-custody keys: nodes that have exactly one user who also maintains it.”

(3) Tradition-Constrained: “If there is low node diversity (or client, or, hub or whatever the building blocks are called — I’ll use node as the generic term) they simply catalyze monolith (monolithicism?) risk at the node design level.”

(4) Structured-Evolving: “A protocolized court checks monarchical power and protects commoners who might be in court to appeal to the monarch for something. Modern example: healthcare protocols weaken arbitrariness and negligence moral hazard of doctors, empower patients.”

(5) Structured-Evolving: “They are protocols that satisfy the following conditions: Node behaviors are few-shot learnable and result in the local installation of extremely light self-maintained nodes of every required type; The protocol is defined by interoperability constraints that are loose enough that all/most nodes can be maintained to be sufficiently interoperable with all/most others at low cost.”

(6) Procedure-Bound: “Blockchain-like protocols have a subtler version of the monolith tendency/risk. If there is low node diversity (or client, or, hub or whatever the building blocks are called — I’ll use node as the generic term) they simply catalyze monolith (monolithicism?) risk at the node design level.”

(7) Procedure-Bound: “Unlike generic informal protocols like ‘handshake’ which are simple enough that every actor essentially maintains a unique but sufficiently interoperable version of the ‘node code,’ blockchains are sufficiently complex one or a few flavors of each node type become necessary, and the people building them turn into de-facto third parties with some inevitable residual centralization/monolith risks.”

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