Self-Enforcing Protocols
How can you not like an article that involves cake, pirates, and property taxes?<p>One thing that I wonder is how is a self reinforcing transaction affected when the third parties that used to mediate it are shut out.  For example, certificate authority companies that are no longer needed.<p>Furthermore, the "all hands" in the room as opposed to secret ballot voting - while on the surface it is self reinforcing from a social perspective it wouldn't really work (i.e. the coercion he mentioned and also the lemming effect where someone votes with their crowd delaying raising their hand just enough to see what the consensus is).<p>Finally, the collusion and breakage of a self-reinforcing system like the pirate example shows that a self-reinforcing protocol is situationally dependent.  What are the chances that at least one pirate will collude with the captain? (I bet the chance is quite high considering the nature of pirates)  As opposed to the property tax example which seems to be a very good use of such a protocol.