People tend to talk of protocols a lot. When I was doing a mandatory military service, the first shock was the the variables a simple salute write into. I got used to it in a couple of days. The real problem with military salute protocols is not their existence but that people tend to be afraid of in-protocol meanness of reality.
The same intuition goes for decentralized protocols as well. Yes, I am not talking about mere distributed systems. I do however talk about decentralized protocols that constitute at-least-yet-sufficiently autonomous systems of complex world-making into the present future: People are afraid of protocols that are simply so complex that there is an inherent drive thereof whereby the utmost minimalism is a vast object of desire—righteously.
Herein, that which makes people afraid is the process per se and the work it requires. People tend to overlook how much dedication and diligent self-sacrifice go into robust incentive mechanism oriented protocols that are destined to replace the almost obsolete complex information systems upon which our hive works.