Protocol Town Hall with Gordon Brander | Noosphere: A Protocol for Thought

Gordon Brander presents Noosphere, a decentralized protocol built on IPFS for a 'worldwide decentralized shared mind,' contrasting the original utopian vision of the web (Tim Berners-Lee, Ted Nelson, Engelbart) with the centralized, siloed Web 2.0 shaped by network effects, zero marginal cost, returns to scale, and same-origin security. He argues self-certifying protocols (rooted in user-held cryptographic keys rather than server authority) can restore composability and 'credible exit,' describing concepts like memos, spheres, UCANs, and a solution to Zuko's Triangle via hyperlocal naming, with Subconscious as the first client application. In Q&A, he debates with Kartik, Dorian Taylor, and Venkatesh Rao about whether zero marginal cost truly holds, inevitable centralization (mining pools, email oligopolies), and how UCAN-based key delegation and social recovery can mitigate the trade-off between decentralization and usability.

Related resources

Talk

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

Talk

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

Talk

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.

eigenlayer-intersubjective-faults futarchy-and-prediction-markets governance

Jun 2024

Benjamin Funk