Recognition and gratitude for the people, ideas, and work that made the Autophage Protocol possible.
This work stands on the shoulders of giants.
Deep gratitude to my family and friends who provided both emotional support and critical feedback through countless iterations. Your patience with my obsession over decay rates and biological metaphors exemplifies the human connections that make any economic system worthwhile.
The protocol builds upon decades of groundbreaking work in cryptography and distributed systems. I acknowledge the cypherpunks who first envisioned private digital cash when such ideas seemed impossible. The zero-knowledge research community transformed privacy from policy to mathematics, making health verification without surveillance achievable. Bitcoin demonstrated programmable scarcity. Ethereum generalized blockchain computation. The broader ecosystem continues advancing human freedom through code.
I learned a lot from researchers and writers like Richard Dawkins, Elinor Ostrom, John von Neumann, and from reading far too many papers instead of sleeping. They didn't endorse this work, but their ideas made it possible to approach health and economics differently.
Thank you all.
Conceptual Foundations: The biological economics framework draws heavily from Georgescu-Roegen's work on entropy in economic processes. Stuart Kauffman's theories of self-organization influenced the protocol's emergent properties. Geoffrey West's scaling laws provided the mathematical basis for network effects.
Technical Architecture: The zero-knowledge proof systems build on work by Groth, Maller, and others in the zkSNARK community. The token decay mechanisms were inspired by Silvio Gesell's demurrage currency concepts, though implemented through modern cryptographic means.
Economic Design: Elinor Ostrom's research on common pool resources informed the Reservoir design. The marketplace mechanisms draw from mechanism design theory pioneered by Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson.
Privacy Philosophy: The commitment to privacy-by-design follows principles established by Ann Cavoukian and the broader privacy research community. The separation of identity and activity was influenced by David Chaum's early work on anonymous digital cash.
This project relies on countless open source libraries, protocols, and tools. From the cryptographic primitives to the development frameworks, the entire software ecosystem that makes decentralized systems possible deserves recognition. Every line of code stands on millions of lines written by others.
To those who will take these ideas further: thank you in advance. The protocol is designed to evolve beyond what it is today. Your improvements, critiques, and extensions will determine whether this experiment in biological economics succeeds.
Science progresses through iteration. Economics evolves through experimentation. May this work contribute to both, even if only by showing what doesn't work.
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
— Isaac Newton