I’ve put a lot of time into understanding and integrating the ideas in that paper. I agree that it might not be expressed very well, that’s the problem with an overly rich subject space, I suspect. I had to spend a lot of time talking to Amir before I could wrap my head around what he was trying to do. To be fair, he had to do the same to understand my perspective.

My understanding is that it does use a logic akin to the logic behind pet names. But, until now, it never occurred to me that this logic might be generalised in such a fashion. And even now, I’m not sure. I’d really need to compare the two in depth to see, and both are incompletely documented and there are only so many hours in a day.

As an aside, not necessarily disconnected, I spent a few moments reviewing Zooko’s triangle last night, and tied in the Ricardian Contract as a Type 4 in his numbering. Now, the crossover is that Zooko’s triangle is I’d assert more foundational than the pet names structure, as it is the foundation on which pet names sits. Or, to put it another way, pet names may be one bug fix to the law of ZT. Or, a third way is that this is the engineer’s viewpoint, and this is an engineering problem as much as it is a theoretical security problem.—Ian