Protocols of Trust

10 atomic recall cards. Export to Anki and let spaced repetition do its slow work.

In Anki: File → Import, choose this TSV, set field separator to Tab, deck = Sand to Silicon · Ch 36, note type = Basic.

Front	Back
When did Anthropic open-source MCP?	November 2024.
What does MCP stand for?	Model Context Protocol.
How many MCP server integrations had the registry grown to by end of 2025?	Thousands in the registry, with community directories listing tens of thousands more.
What transport does MCP run over?	Standard JSON-RPC; it is transport-agnostic.
What 1990s standard does the chapter compare MCP to, and why?	ODBC — a standard adapter layer that decouples capability from vendor, with comparable network effects.
What is Google's A2A protocol, and what is its status at end of 2025?	Agent2Agent, announced April 2025 — a JSON-over-HTTPS standard for agent-to-agent task delegation; production deployments were still scarce.
Name the four trust failures the chapter says exist in the naive agent-API setup.	Agent hallucination of API responses, tool lying about actions, insufficient or excessive user permissions, and transport tampering.
Name the four things the chapter says cross-org machine-to-machine trust requires.	Identity, capability description, audit trail, and recourse.
What does the chapter say about how cross-agent identity is handled today?	Mostly with bearer tokens and API keys, which are leaky; decentralized identifiers are a candidate but nothing is mainstream.
What historical analogy does the chapter use for the current state of agent protocol competition?	HTTP around 1992 — multiple proposals, real interest, no consensus, most cross-agent traffic through whatever proprietary glue is cheapest.