Cryptography is a critical component for any information or communication technology.
It is also one of the most fragile,
combinations of perfectly secure cryptographic components are often not secure.
This led to the well-known advice of “don’t roll your own crypto”,
which, predictably, has led to a widespread dearth of cryptography (outside TLS and cryptocurrencies).
This fragility makes cryptography ill-suited for adaptability -
adapting cryptographic primitives or protocols is very difficult!
Versioned nodes are a data model for building collaborative local applications.
It generalizes and merges the ideas underlying Tahoe-LAFS, git, freenet, and other projects,
forming a new unit of data interchange better suited than files to
providing provider-independent security for
distributed collaboration with concurrent modification.
What should a general purpose extensible data exchange format for binary and algebraic data look like?
A Variable Length Quantity is a codec between arbitrary precision non-negative integers,
that is 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on until you run out of space,
and byte strings.