Topic: Tau-Chain and Agoras Official Thread: Generalized P2P Network - page 89. (Read 309654 times)

Actually they already have a functional system and released their code of Github. Arthur Breitman  started a thread here earlier this month and it seems that they are looking at doing a crowdsale in Q1 or Q2, so pretty soon. Let's ask him directly if Tezos is decidable

Really interesting interview of Arthur Breitman, the lead developer of Tezos.
Tezos is one big leap forward in the direction of Tau. It has a lot of common points with Tau. For instance, the protocol is self amending following a very similar process to Tau that is also inspired by the nomic game. Nomic is actually being discussed in the interview. Another important similarity is the use of a custom functional language practical enough to develop with and that comes with built-in formal verification capabilities, the goal being to ship code with a mathematical proof of its properties. Another very similar aspect and that is beautifully well explained in the interview is that blockchain networks are essentially all following the same protocol at a very high level, when you abstract specific details like the exact nature of the state that is being validated, and the exact way that the canonical version is being discriminated, blockchains are essentially all doing the same thing, so Tezos is coming with built-ins that can handle all the low level stuff like i/os as well as generic blockchain mechanics, and all the specific blockchain rules are left for the users to decide in the genesis block (they call it "seed protocol") and subsequent protocol amendments. This allows Tezos to implement Bitcoin, Ethereum and any other blockchain. Even the idea of writing program specifications as a set of constraints and letting the compiler come up with an implementation that is guaranteed to meet the constraints is addressed. A last thing: Breitman alludes at some point to the fact Ethereum is doing a mistake by attempting to be a "universal computer" that can compute everything, and explains that a blockchain network doesn't need full spectrum computation and that a subset of what Ethereum can do is sufficient. Although he doesn't point specifically to concepts such as turing completeness and decidability, and doesn't state where Tezos stands on that aspect, it sure seems like he is referring to that but keeping things simple to avoid perplexing the non-technical audience. Is Tezos decidable too?

Now, that makes a hell lot of common points with Tau, doesn't it? And they are planning to release this year!
Ohad, are you following Tezos closely enough? What's your take on their technology?

forming the blocks will begin centralized so no problem for the beginning.
moreover, many of the network's features, will not require blockchain at all (anything that doesn't care which rule came first).
in the process of forming the decentralized version using the centralized one, we'll have to consider mining reward. the amount of miners we'll need will be more or less proportional to the cap we intend to support. i mentioned few times that i'm for "miners tax", but that's my personal opinion on an issue to be agreed collaboratively.

How do you secure the network without a native coin? The thing about Ethereum and Bitcoin is it cost large sums of money to attack.

there are some similar concepts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_social_network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Semantic_Web
(they're more like the first alpha, nothing like the next alphas)

but i didn't find anywhere (not even in game theory yet) something about collaborative theory formation (in contrast to numerical rather logical data. and in contrast to players each with their own preferences and score. here we're about groups of people each having more or less shared goal, and a logic-consensus driven process. even nomic is not about how to build a theory, but about how to build the game itself). seems like we're establishing a new field here.


very hard to estimate. at least for me. i must admit that part of the delay is due to new ideas that don't stop coming. a recent one was to convert your theory to a wiki, so you could browse the encyclopedia of your own worldview. or let others browse it. (or compare it with another one's, for the sake of partnership, or dating, or common interest.. but that's an old idea, the new idea is the wiki format). and obv most of the time i think of the math aspects of this all which are nontrivial. especially how to write a scalable solver

Finally I am getting somewhere, and I am not the laziest one... , some could give up


Hmm... Can't even imagine where it can get us. It's like with the time bringing all the world's knowledge in one place and having power and abilities to properly sort it, operate it and constantly grow and improve it.  Is it something that already tested? Can you estimate when the first code will be ready?

The idea is amazing, and clearer now. thank you Ohad for your efforts!!!

TAUCHAIN -  the power of AI to everyone altogether (and by everyone altogether), rather to be held by centralized entities
Sounds really great, this sentence is Amazing Ohad. Explain tauchain shortly and powerfully

10 points for you

you're getting there.. not fully though, here

every team will "train" (collaboratively and comuter-aided-ly build a theory) their own project.
in parallel to that, every person/profile will have their own theory, perspective, built from their own sources, and by agreeing/disagreeing to others, etc.
add to that the special root team, which defines the system itself.
then we can use the machine to query theories, or prove assertions, or discover new knowledge, or check consistency, or calculate the consensus, or synthesize a model/program that admits a theory/spec...

can ask the following question:
how can one make sense of thousands of people giving advice on how to build a specific software?
tau is all about that.

Decentralized AI it's the whole different story! Skynet has some bad connotations though
In my opinion, right branding and marketing it's very important, maybe even the most important part. No doubt, tau needs the right story that can spread the idea, story that solves needs or wants of people. Most of the crypto projects today are not even close to the ideas of tau but with the right marketing some of them succeed in wrapping it in a very desirable package, the result of it is attention and investments.
In case of tau that could be 100% authentic story because the value that tau can give to the world is truly game changing.




Is this to quotes can be combined? Decentralized AI that we going to train all together in a kind of game?

of course. but not over the first alpha, which will support theories in more general fashion, but not support "processes" yet. the next alphas will deal with such transition, generalizing knowledge to programs. we're able to do so thanks to releasing ourselves from the curry-howard approach.

Last question and I'm sure many here would like to hear the answer to...I believe I heard this in a podcast...

I can use Bitcoin over Tau?

tau is not neural net. we'll reach skynet once we implement a neural net over tau (easy) and train it (hard).
the direct training of tau is not by machine learning methods but more like "rule based AI" methods

In my humble opinion, it should be majority focused on AI and ideas like the Internet of Things. Right now I think the concept is so abstract that people don't really grasp what this is. Yea it can be alot of things but I want to hear about cool decentralized terminator robots.

Just tell me you are building Skynet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator)

Thanks for all your hard work.

indeed an important motivation of tau, is to bring the power of AI to everyone altogether (and by everyone altogether), rather to be held by centralized entities

Tau needs a use case and just market that. Ethereum use case was smart contracts. To me, Tau "main" use case is Artificial Intelligence. Market AI when talking about Tau. Maybe even change the name to something cool and robotic like "Skynet".  

eth is a system about coins and contracts. tau is something completely different. it has no coins or contracts, but is a platform that such things can be created over it (like agoras will be an economy over tau). more accurately, tau is a tool for collaborative definition of itself, no more and no less, and from there can evolve into anything.


no. if there were already one truly collaboratively-self-amending piece of software, i wouldn't have to write tau


tau is a tool for collaboratively forming theories and software, in the most general sense. nothing to do with coins/contracts specifically


the proposed mechanism is not the draft-by-draft example, but somewhere in the middle of the two examples. it's a very simple yet slightly ugly formula, i'll explain it in the presentation. what it aims to do is to calculate the precise core that all players agree on.


blockchain is just for us to securely know "which rule came first". and this will be the main centralized aspect in the first alpha: a server that time-orders messages. afterwards we'll collaboratively move into a fully decentralized system.

i hope it's helpful, please let me know, indeed my current efforts is maximizing the range of the public that will be able to understand the concepts (therefore obv the current terminology is tentative)

Yes, it's understood that the self-defining and self-amending are the main thing here. But I refer to eth just in purpose of better understanding from my non tech beginner point of view. I am trying to visualize the tau without getting too much into how it technically happens.  Your example with facebook was very helpful for visualizing but facebook is also not self-defining and self-amending.

If you want the largest possible audience to actually read the paper it has to draw the right picture in target audence minds. I don't even understand in full how exactly etherium works but I for sure understand it better than tau for now, I understand the advantages of etherium and smart contracts and what it can bring to the world. After I got familiar with Tauchain I realized that there is a limitations in etherium, and tau is trying to brake those limitations. I am sure I am not alone at that level of understanding, the comment of ryvirath above proofs that.

Is it right to say that the "self-amending decentralized program (tau)" is equivalent of eth's virtual machine? Teams over tau can create smart contracts collaboratively in a very innovative way, using a new consensus mechanism (contract-draft-by-draft) that prevents paradoxes and contradictions. What happens next? How and where self-amending happens? How blockchain involved here? What is the structure?

Maybe you're right and eth it's not the right example, then what could be the right one? Nomic, the process of theory formation and so on it's very interesting but something is missing here, it should be warped in something that makes it sound simple. I am just trying to be helpful here and represent some fraction (maybe even significant one) of the target audience that going to read that paper.

Maybe similar to Dfinity. It's Ethereum plus a new type of consensus mechanism plus the blockchain nervous system. The BNS is basically a super user AI (with op codes that can alter any parameters) coordinated by a liquid democracy/futarchy. I'm pretty excited about it. Reminded me a little of Tau.

not sure i understood (maybe has to do with the rule-by-rule or contract-draft-by-draft as in https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17799590 recalling that replacing the whole contract draft is like replacing the whole client's code so it can be totally different),
every team can change their own rules, or equivalently their own [pre-]theory, and if the team happens to be designing code, then they can agree that the spec is ready and then synthesize code from the spec and run it. but they won't be able to change the code of the platform (tau) itself. for that, a specific team (root/tau) will be created.
the root team will have a huge influence on the platform, and theoretically they can destroy all other teams and the whole thing. if something is amendable, then it can change to something completely different.
to bootstrap final tau's process, we will have a team over the alpha that supports programs, and over it we will construct a self-amending decentralized program (tau), after we all take into considerations the security of the system. so the final construct will not begin empty as planned from the beginning, but on the other hand, it won't begin arbitrary, but begin with rules under consensus derived over previous alphas.
i don't think it's comparable to eth. eth is by no means self-defining or self-amending.

great idea! but can come in addition, not instead, because some people want to move between their own wallets from time to time.
we can set that when the final coins will be ready, addresses that hold the tokens, will get more coins, according to the so-called "coin days".
the numbers are obvious: we'll do it relatively to the 15% discount.
so, another way to get the 15% discount, is simply not to move your tokens from the 1st of march which is about two weeks from now (this doesn't hold for tokens held on bittrex). i'll write it publicly somewhere.