Originally posted at: What kinds of things should be standardized? – William Entriken Blog
tl;dr A standard only deserves to be written if multiple people adhere to it and people depend on it’s surface area.
An easy, low-effort, low-quality way to find a bunch of things to standardize is to find a popular repository of smart contracts, and then write every one of them up with a short rationale. This is fun for practice, but please do not publish these as it will be a waste of other people’s time to read. Nobody depends on these details.
Unfortunately the EIP repository is a magnet for people to try and publish things that have no need to be published let alone standardized. Of course the reason why is some people see an ERC as a status symbol (it isn’t) or a guarantee of commercial success (it isn’t).
But if you really WANT to make something and standardize it, here’s how.
- Go make a thing that is useful
- Make it successful
- Make other people want to interoperate with your thing
- Make other people want to copy you
- Then go standardize it
Please see the longer article discusses further and compares to standards in other realms (food labeling, paper sizes, USB) to further illustrate the point. But I hope this thread can make some consensus that the main kind of ERC application standards we want to see are multi-implementation (producer) specifications that actually will be used by some other software (consumers).
This is a higher threshold than just “anything I can write a standard for or that somebody 10 years from now might find helpful”.