Hand Washing and Bitcoin Share a Skeleton
Shingai Thornton argues that protocols are formally systems, proving that seven independent systems-theory traditions (Klir, Bunge, Mobus, etc.) share one irreducible structure—a 'walking arrow' or quiver where one thing depends on another. She uses Lean 4 to machine-verify this convergence across three worked examples: handwashing (a contamination-threshold homeostat), TCP/HTTP composition, and Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment (a fixed-point-governed homeostat), proposing this as a candidate 'floor' for a grand unified protocol modeling theory.
Shingai Thornton
