The Power of Tau - Scaling the Creation of Knowledge

in #tauchain6 years ago (edited)

Ohad Asor, creator of Tau Chain/Agoras, has recently published the long awaited blog post detailing his vision for what very likely is the most ambitious project in the crypto space: Tau.

Tau will accelerate human endeavors by overcoming long ingrained limitations in our collaborative processes; limitations which we rarely even question

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The Problem of Social Governance

Take social governance, for example. As individuals, we have opinions over a wide variety of social issues. Perhaps you feel that the speed limit on certain roads is too high, or that programming should be a compulsory subject at public schools, or that everyone would benefit if cryptocurrencies were officially recognized and endorsed by the state.

However, you have no idea how to get these concerns across to the general public. I mean you could try writing a letter to your local representative or signing a petition but ultimately that's unlikely to gain much traction. Meanwhile, the very same issues that seems to have divided the nation over the past decade remain at the forefront of our political debate. Immigration, climate change, abortion, gun control etc. are all important issues of course, but very little progress have been made considering the amount of time, resources and attention that have been devoted to them.

So the problem with traditional forms of social governance, such as democratic voting, is apparent: on the one hand it has difficulty identifying and addressing the wide range of opinions different people hold, on the other hand, even with respect to the small number of issues that do end up bubbling up to the surface, it isn't particularly efficient at detecting consensus.

The central cause of this problem is that current modes of discussion are not scalable. There are inherent limitations in the way we're able to communicate our views across to each other; namely, human ability to comprehend and organize information is the main bottleneck. We cannot possible follow multiple conversations at once, or recall everyone's propositions once there are more than a handful of people in the mix. This is why most collaborative decision making bodies in practice are generally quite small in number: the President's cabinet, Supreme Court Justices, boardroom directions of a fortune 100 company etc.; you just can't have a productive discussion with 50 people. Our entire civilization is structured around this very limitation: discussions don't scale.

Scaling Collaborative Discussions Under Tau

Imagine if we can overcome this limitation; what will it mean for social governance? By using a self defining, decidable logic, the Tau network is easily able to keep track of every user's propositions and detect consensus automatically. Note that making a proposition is exactly the same as voting for that very same proposition: when you're proposing 'dogs should always be on a leash in public unless in a park' you're in effect putting in a vote for such a proposition. This way, countless issues, regardless of how technical or niche, can be assessed through the network concurrently, and social consensus can be detected on the fly. The Tau network can scale social governance by overcoming one of the greatest limitation in human communication of ideas by delegating the task of logically making sense of everybody's propositions to the computer. A simple use case of this will be the rules of the Tau network itself: through a self defining logic, Tau is able to detect consensus among its users from block to block, altering its own rules to conform to the choices of the user base.

The benefits of scaling discussions are not limited to just a more efficient form of social governance. Logic isn't merely about detecting surface level consensus, the network can easily form further deductions from everyone's propositions. If one states 'all men are mortal' and 'Socrates is a man', one can deduce that 'Socrates is mortal.' But deductions can be very deep and non trivial. Imagine if we had a group of 1000 mathematicians all inputting their mathematical insight as propositions. Tau can rapidly detect who agrees with whom on what, and deduce every logical consequence of their combined wisdom; in effect arriving to new truths and insights. In other words, Tau greatly accelerates the production of new knowledge. This will, of course, also work if you have physicists, doctors, engineers, computer scientists, indeed experts in every field working together on the platform. By scaling collaborative discussions in a logical network, Tau is able to scale the creation of knowledge.

When Tau comes into effect, any company, government, and indeed any organization not using this new network will be rendered obsolete. Tau aims to become an indispensable technology.

And this is only the alpha of Tau.

I will talk about the beta in a future posts. The beta will revolve around not just the scaling of discussions and consensus, but the automation and execution of code based of the results of those discussion. For more information on code synthesis and more, please read Ohad's blog. Also, do check out my introduction to Tau here if you missed it.

You can invest in Tau through buying Agoras tokens on Bittrex.


I am not affiliated or paid by the project. These represent my own subjective views. Tau/Agoras is the only other crypto project apart from Steem in which I see an extraordinary future, and I am merely sharing that with fellow Steemians here.


Resource:
Ohad Asor's New Tau Blog
Github
Buy Agoras Tokens to Invest in Tau
Telegram Chat
IRC Chat: Where you may ask Ohad himself technical questions
Tau Reddit
Tau Chinese QQ Group: 203884141

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The benefits of scaling discussion is an ability to scale collaborative agreement. This is critical in my opinion for dealing with ethical dilemmas which will routinely emerge, and for deciding upon technical options which are in the long term best interest of the network as a whole.

So we will be able to use this platform for example to answer questions about the design of Tau itself, such as whether to go with Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, a hybrid, or the HashGraph, all which have been promoted by various factions.

yes, it's also something that has been notoriously difficult to achieve both in decentralized and centralized communities

scaling consensus is something overlooked. I think most of the problems from btc arises from their inability to scale discussions and consensus.

Absolutely true that the perfect test case for this will be the rules of the Tau network itself, do we favor the security of PoW, the performance of Delegated PoS or Hashgraph, some combination, or a new design arrived to on the platform itself. And to think this can happen this year is pretty amazing.

If the platform can demonstrate it is successful at logically scale consensus and discussion, I'd expect it to be a top 10 project in the very least

First off, I'm very glad to see this article so high up on trending after painfully holding this coin for 2 years and watching everything from bitcoin to pepecoin take off and Agoras stay sideways. Thank you for that... Price is almost reflecting bitcoin gains, Ohad is finally putting together all of his thoughts into something we can touch and feel, and people are getting interested in this grand project.

With that being said I still treat this as a complete moonshot given the scope and complexity of this idea. This is not just another spin on blockchain and I truly believe Ohad is paving the way with this new tech. It is too early to know what will ultimately come out of this project or if it will work at all but that is part of the excitement when investing in a high risk, high reward project such as this. If Ohad is able to pull this off it will be monumental and price will reflect such. It reminds me of bitcoin when it was very new and it was still an unheard of project.

I agree, if Ohad is able to deliver, top 10 coin.
Cheers

Nice the best post
Best of the best
Do think be the best but think be the best in order be the best

I expect Tau to be the tool to put all crypto upright. At the end of the day all confusion and Darwinism there is collective decisions scaling problem too. Tauless blockchains will get "obsoleted in a heartbeat" , either ...

I think so too, this year will be pivotal for tau

I suppose it that you're be best commentary

Thanks for posting this update! After your last post I have spent some time reading up on this - via @danaedwards posts and other sources.
Incredibly difficult to understand and I am not there yet, but this post really helps.
I also now hold some Agoras tokens, with more in the pipeline 👍

Cheers

nobody fully understands tau except Ohad
dana and I barely scratch the surface
do read ohad's latest blog, it gives a lot of insight to what tau can achieve

I'm in the same boat as @holbein81 (above comment). I didn't even know about Tau and now I am reading up and watching youtube vids on tau. And I put in a bid to buy some AGRS on Bittrex. I checked and I'm surprised Binance doesn't offer AGRS.

For those who are interested in buying, the price has fallen almost 50% from the spike up approx 2 weeks ago. Wishing everyone a great new year, full of opportunities and adventures.

Nice the best post
Best of the best

thanks for upvote

@trafalgar,
When Tau comes into effect, any company, government, and indeed any organization not using this new network will be rendered obsolete. Tau aims to become an indispensable technology.

Actually i don't know how they wish to do this and today first time i heard about this Tau Chain! But this is incredible! If they could implement this it might work perfectly! Amazing update and very informative! Thank you very much for sharing this great information to us! I will try to find more details about it! Really appreciate your effort!

Cheers~

yes, a lot is at stake
and it can do even more than just scale the production of knowledge
this is a very technically demanding project that requires cutting edge knowledge in mathematics, computer science, logic, programming, etc.
fortunately, Ohad is a prodigy and has spent over 30 years studying over 10 hours a day
a lot will come down to execution, for more information check out his latest blog http://www.idni.org/blog/the-new-tau

@trafalgar,
"this is a very technically demanding project that requires cutting edge knowledge in mathematics, computer science, logic, programming, etc."
Thank you, I am going to read his blog now! Feel like a new kind of Nakamoto is going to birth soon via Ohad!
Thank you again!

Cheers~

Tauchain is a decidable complete logic, per block, with Turing completeness recovered by the iteration of multiple blocks. We can still compute any computable thing; it may just require structuring the execution to run over the span of multiple blocks; because of this, Tauchain resources don't need to be backed directly by a token, and resource exchange can be negotiated by the users as they see fit. @traflagar, definitely this is a real educative post. Glad to catch this.

I'm not sure how technically correct that is
the tau meta language logic is decidable and self defining under pspace complexity
It can compile under expspace but interpret under pspace
To answer what can't Tau do is a very non trivial question, according to Ohad, but some expressiveness were sacrificed to obtain both decidability and self definition

this allows features like scaling logical discussions and code synthesis to be possible

Do check out ohad's latest blog

Would people have to have access to the internet to be able to access this network and have an opinion? Because if this is so, a lot of people will be left out, thus Tau would not be representing a real consensus. I'm just curious, this is the first I have ever heard about this.

yes, and ohad foresaw this
which is why there is the router space initiative to decentralize the physical infrastructure of the internet and expand it to everyone
http://www.idni.org/

I do not see this as a problem. We live in a world where mobile broadband is several times more widespread than proper sewage services. The hardware connectivity is already here. Tau will not just push it to its saturation point, but as trafalgar wisely noted the decentralized physical infrastructure will get huge innovation boost.

Damn, that is impressive, it is everything the oligarchs don't want, positive consensus that empowers the health and wealth of the people at the expense of the greed, violence, and power of the anointed rulers. It is the vision of how things should be in a sophisticated, enlightened, scientific culture.

and on top of that, it can accelerate the productivity and research of our species many times over
it's the industrialization of knowledge creation

The legacy bandwidth bottleneck-ed hierarchic system also very importantly put severe limitations on the growth of wealth. Tauful societies will be orders of magnitude more productive than hierarchies. Survivability of tauless hierarchic social structures vs tauful geodesic ones will be like of ice cubes into ocean of boiling water. The freedom of tau - stronger than the strongest bonds based on force / coercion. Hierarchies will loose all their means to coerce its human beings content into ignorance, poverty etc.

Dude, it’s awesome to see you reporting in Tauchain!

Dana has been my only source that got me into it and has been able to translate such that I could begin grasping the possibilities. I know you produce some excellent content that is quite accessible to a lot of people, so am stoked to see more of your takes on how it’s development unfolds. 😎🙏

i wrote a previous piece as well (just 2 posts ago)
more introductory than this one and has a bit of humor
not sure if humor is necessary when it comes to describing tech that's difficult to understand in the first place, depends on my mood i guess

thanks for having a look rok, if tau succeeds it'll be a revolutionary piece of tech

I've been somewhat keeping up with Tau and checking the subreddit occasionally and slowly starting to grasp it all. I saw your comment about the IDNI for routers space and that REALLY caught my eye.

Ohad doesn't miss much when it comes to his design
tau is far more advanced and technical than I've given it credit for
a decidable, self defining logical TML is not easy, it'll take someone like me years to even understand that something like this has provable pspace maximum expressiveness

The guy is a super genius. Keep an eye on the github updates and do check out the explanatory blog of Ohad's http://www.idni.org/blog/the-new-tau

Wow, it seems soo unreal... I just can't comprehend it fully, the post You linked says that Tau doesn't even use machine learning to guess one's opinion. I wonder how it'll be done then. Thank You for sharing, You've explained it pretty simply but it looks like the project is way bigger than I thought. Surely worthy of interest.

no, what we call machine learning generally refers to statistical learning
basically if you show a billion photos of cows from different angles the machine becomes gradually better at spotting a cow from a shoe or something

tau revolves around a logical interface, getting the machine to collect and organize our data and deduce knowledge, and then automate code that will carry out certain tasks based on this combined knowledge

Hmm, I see, thank You for clearing this up!

Thanks for sharing. This project sounds very interesting. Once Tau is fully implemented, what will that future look like? Could you share some of your thoughts on that? I will have to look far more deeply into this to understand and to start building predictions myself you see.

hard to say, I imagine that human technological advancement will rapidly accelerate under Tau's help
and many things like virtual economics will be completely automated
if the internet is like a network of roads, than tau is the self driving car

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