[dystopiabreaker]

I'm pretty sure that you can pop down to the search bar and type "TLS too inefficient" and see that, in fact, they did. there was a large period of time where TLS was not widely deployed and where it was viewed as not likely to be deployed, due to marginal performance reasons

[MattPalmer1086]

True, the overhead of TLS is relatively much lower than it was. It turned out we all really need the greater security. So we got hardware AES acceleration for example.

But this example misses the more general point that protocols always evolve more slowly than platforms.

It's not really a good example. Platforms aren't in competition with layer 3 network protocols. The examples Moxie gave were layer 7 application protocols.