Guest Talk with Benjamin Funk | Crypto-Powered Information Games

Benjamin Funk, an analyst at crypto VC firm Archetype, presents a framework for analyzing the 'information supply chain' and argues that surveillance capitalism persists because we lack protocols that work backward from what information consumers (governing bodies, businesses, individuals) actually need to make good decisions. He critiques existing crypto decision-making mechanisms—EigenLayer's token (good for intersubjective faults but not subjective predictions), Optimism's retroactive public goods funding (centralized preference function), and MetaDAO's futarchy (fails to surface surprising information and suffers from reflexivity)—while highlighting the Negation Game as a promising model that incentivizes surfacing consequential and surprising information through self-slashing stakes.

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Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

benchmarks-as-protocols-perplexity-arc-vibe-based-evaluation chollets-formal-definition-of-intelligence-and-generalization-hierarchy eu-ai-act-risk-based-regulatory-tiers

May 2024

Daniel Bashir

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Guest Talk with Jesse Walden | Contract Theory and Protocol Design

Jesse Walden (Variant VC, co-founder of Media Chain) presents a framework derived from Oliver Hart's contract theory, distinguishing 'complete' protocols (simple, deterministic, trust-minimized, automated — e.g. Bitcoin, Uniswap v1) from 'incomplete' protocols that require ongoing human governance and interpretation (e.g. Aave, Nouns DAO, MolochDAO's rage-quit mechanism). He argues many crypto projects fall into an 'uncanny valley' by claiming completeness/decentralization they don't actually have, and points to Uniswap v4's hooks as a hybrid model that automates a complete core while delegating customization to the market. Discussion with Tim, Angela Walch, and others explores whether true completeness is ever attainable, the role of tokens as 'economic alignment' products, and regulatory incentives (SEC's 'sufficient decentralization') that pressure projects to overclaim completeness.

complete-vs-incomplete-protocols contract-theory-oliver-hart governance

Jun 2023

Jesse Walden

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Guest Talk with Alex Komoroske | Gardening Platforms

Alex Komoroske, drawing on his experience leading Chrome's web platform team, argues that platforms should be 'gardened' rather than engineered: built incrementally and horizontally from adjacent possible use cases rather than vertically toward a single predetermined goal, with continuous 'rationalization' to pay down the debt that inevitably accumulates as platform and ecosystem co-evolve. He frames platforms and their ecosystems as living, symbiotic systems bound by a 'gravitational pull' that breaks if changes move too fast, and discusses how platforms die through ossification, rising coordination costs, or failed 'second system' rewrites. In Q&A he extends the framework to crypto protocols, corporate digital transformation, and security-by-design, debating with Toby Shorin and others how legal/organizational fragmentation changes platform dynamics in permissionless networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Solana.

coordination-headwinds-metabolic-rate-of-debt gardening-platforms-as-living-ecosystems governance

Jun 2023

Alex Komoroske