Pinned post
@tobi and I sat down to talk UCP and the art of protocol design. A couple of themes worth expanding on...
The hard part of good protocol design isn't the spec. It's the deep understanding of the problem you're solving and the humility to approach it at the right level. Commerce is infinitely complex and always evolving; it's hubris to pretend anyone can 'spec commerce'.
But wait — isn't UCP trying to do exactly that?
No, UCP doesn't 'spec commerce'. It models the rules of the bazaar that make commerce possible. The job of UCP is to build the boring parts: the small core of common and composable primitives, and the discovery and negotiation mechanisms that everything else runs on. Done right, this lets commerce thrive in the open, with merchants, agents, and buyers deciding what is advertised, supported, and adopted, not by fiat from a protocol committee. This is UCP. 👇🏻🧵
The hard part of good protocol design isn't the spec. It's the deep understanding of the problem you're solving and the humility to approach it at the right level. Commerce is infinitely complex and always evolving; it's hubris to pretend anyone can 'spec commerce'.
But wait — isn't UCP trying to do exactly that?
No, UCP doesn't 'spec commerce'. It models the rules of the bazaar that make commerce possible. The job of UCP is to build the boring parts: the small core of common and composable primitives, and the discovery and negotiation mechanisms that everything else runs on. Done right, this lets commerce thrive in the open, with merchants, agents, and buyers deciding what is advertised, supported, and adopted, not by fiat from a protocol committee. This is UCP. 👇🏻🧵
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