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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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  • Apparently I just made this term up but I'm astonished if I'm the first. I'm not entirely happy with it but it was a big hit when I mentioned it in my Jubilee and Forgiveness talk at Protocols/Symposium 2026. I mean something like, basic virtues. Atomic virtues, but that sounds like a business self-help book. Root virtues but that sounds fake-Buddhist. Generative virtues maybe. blyg

Jubilee and Forgiveness

27 Sep 2026 - 28 Sep 2026
Open in Logseq

    • Program version

      • Jubilee: meta-protocols against entrenchment
      • Friday, September 25 · 20:00–20:30 UTC *(1:00 PM–1:30 PM in Pacific Daylight Time)*
      • Mike Travers
      • Money and other economic protocols are some of the oldest we have, but they have a problem: a tendency toward entrenchment, with accumulated effects that compound over time, producing extremes of wealth and poverty that threaten the legitimacy of the economy and society as a whole. The Biblical Jubilee, which mandated periodic cancellation of debts and return of land every fifty years, represents one of the oldest known attempts to solve this problem through what we might call a meta-protocol: a protocol designed to periodically suspend or reverse the lock-in effects of other protocols. This talk develops a general theory of anti-entrenchment protocols, using the Jubilee archetype to illuminate a class of mechanisms that recurs across ancient debt law, modern bankruptcy codes, antitrust enforcement, constitutional amendment rules, and blockchain governance — most recently in Ethereum's "difficulty bomb," a deliberately engineered protocol crisis. Biblical Jubilee has well-known agency problems; we'll take a look at how protocol mechanism design can address them.