Retrofitting the Web — Protocolized

Dorian Taylor argues that designing for comprehension—enabling people to understand how systems work and communicate about them effectively—is essential to retrofitting the Web as infrastructure. The paper contends that literacy in complex systems is a learnable skill, positioning design for clarity and model-building as critical to improving digital communication.

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Paper

Addressing

This paper examines addressing schemes in computing systems, from physical memory addresses to hierarchical file organization and internet URLs, establishing how different protocols and structures require distinct addressing mechanisms to navigate data storage and retrieval. The authors argue that computers must support multiple addressing paradigms that work seamlessly together, drawing analogies between digital addressing and physical-world location systems.

blockchain infrastructure protocols

Dec 2023

Tim Beiko, Mario Havel

Paper

Protocol Foundations 001: Cryptography

This foundational paper traces the historical development of cryptography from Caesar ciphers to modern encryption techniques, establishing symmetric-key encryption as a core design principle where a shared key enables both encryption and decryption of messages. The authors situate cryptographic methods as essential infrastructure for secure communication protocols, with examples ranging from wartime military applications to contemporary computational systems.

blockchain infrastructure protocols

Dec 2023

Mario Havel, Tim Beiko

Paper

Protocol Foundations 004

This paper explains how hashes and hash-based data structures, particularly hash tables and Merkle trees, enable efficient data integrity verification and lookup in large-scale information systems. The authors build on foundational cryptographic concepts to demonstrate how these structures form the basis for secure data proofs in modern digital infrastructure.

blockchain infrastructure protocols

Jan 2024

Mario Havel, Tim Beiko