alt Hacker NewsI feel like the word "protocol", is just abused like it is a glorified marketing term. Kind of like how the word "hacker" was abused in everything else that had nothing to do with hacking.
MCP was just a glorified way of tool calling but generated so much hype (and it eventually died down). Now we have MPP. Which again - could have just been another tool call exposed to the agent.
Imagine you hire someone who claimed to have invented a new protocol and you're thinking of something like TCP or UDP, but all they share is just a markdown file.
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The good ol' folks at Stripe's collaborators Tempo Labs tried to make an RFC-style description page for MPP: https://paymentauth.org/ (full doc on IETF draft page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment...)
I almost was going to point it out as evidence there was thought put into it. Nope, it's flimsy and AI generated.
Also, it contains provisions for scamming customers:
> 403 indicates the payment succeeded but access is denied by policy
No, it doesn't explain how to refund payments for customers you deny access to.
I've been thinking this, but never really put it into words.
Every time I see one of these I think "You are just describing an API".
I mean, I have had people unironically declare they had written compilers or exploits, which were actually just javascript or golang wrappers around the real payload, or all of the irrelevant lexer/parser/typechecker/optimizer/assembler bits.. I'm sure they were just as trivial, especially today with LLMs..
I think this started when "web3" cryptocurrency projects started using the term to pretend that something which isn't much more than a service that uses a blockchain network to move money around was actually somehow "decentralized" and that that made it more trustworthy.
"protocol" is just an agreement to communicate in a standardized way. this is a protocol. a tool call exposed to the agent is a protocol - the act of "exposing it to the agent" means you're defining a protocol.
there's nothing wrong with calling this a protocol. the problem is in hyping it up as though every protocol is going to be world-changing on the level of TCP.