Skip to content

Retrofitting the Web

Paper Dorian Taylor

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.

Related resources

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

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

Mario Havel, Tim Beiko

Paper

Protocol Foundations 003: Hashing

This paper explains cryptographic hashing as a fundamental building block of digital infrastructure, defining hash functions as one-way operations that deterministically map arbitrary-sized inputs to fixed-sized outputs while revealing no information about the input. The authors emphasize key properties including collision resistance and the practical irreversibility of hashing, distinguishing it from encryption.

blockchain infrastructure protocols

Mario Havel, Tim Beiko