Remembering Nikolai Mushegian

The article sets out six design principles for the Rico project, a system for synthetic financial assets, which it says differ culturally from earlier iterations. It argues that incentives act like natural law, so any incentive-incompatible feature will eventually be exploited, and that "gradual decentralization" is therefore a strategic error. It also holds that credible neutrality is a competitive advantage, that power users are the primary customer, and that developers should show the system as it is with full visibility into its mechanics. The principles further reject centralization points as attack vectors, citing DNS hijacks and GitHub account hacks, and call for systems that are easily auditable and minimal.