On Mon, May 13, 2019, at 19:57, Eliot Lear wrote: > Indeed. Those engaging in new technology areas need Postel’s Law in > order to prove the concept. The trick is catching the shift from PoC to > real stuff such that you don’t end up in the wrong equilibrium, and > there are two: stuck with poorly behaving implementations and > underployed due to too much friction. This might have been a fair analysis in the 80s or 90s, but I suspect that there has been a gradual shift away from deployment of less mature protocols. Today, I'd say that it is more often the case that standardization is occurring closer to the "mature" end of things. This is partly because activation energy for new stuff is fairly high, and so high-friction standardization isn't that much of a delta. If nothing else, the security requirements the network imposes on new protocols is enough to make careful standardization look relatively cheap. So I'd caution against following this line of reasoning too far. Lessons of the distant past might not apply, even for those breaking (relatively) new ground.
