What Is Tau? - My Only Other Crypto Investment

in #cryptocurrency7 years ago (edited)

Something Revolutionary In the Crypto Space


The overwhelming majority of new crypto projects out there fall into 3 main categories:

  1. A pure currency with a twist, be it anonymity, speed, no transactions fees, no transactions at all etc.
  2. A smart contract platform with a minor adjustment in trade offs - offering less security for more performance, more security for less performance, less security for less performance etc.
  3. A quasi unintentional scam; the sort of idea that sounds pretty good at the pub after you've all downed 6 or 7 drinks, then instead of waking up and realizing it's stupid, proceed to put together a fancy website and kick an ICO based off of it. (I honestly think maybe 90%+ of cryptos belong in this group)

Now the trillion dollar question is this: is just having a currency or shoving a Turing Complete programming language into the blockchain to allow for smart contracts truly the best use of this decentralized innovation? Ohad Asor, creator and lead developer of Tau, does not think so.

Tauchain-Logo-hor.png

What Is Tau?


Before I start I have to make a confession: I don't truly understand Tau. But I feel that I don't understand it slightly less than people who don't know about it at all, so I'll have a go at explaining it.

Tau is a platform that is designed to scale human collaboration and knowledge building.

Almost every significant piece of technology to date (that isn't about accelerating physical labor) has been primarily focused on the disseminating information or data. The wheel, roads, telephones, the internet are all indispensable achievements that have served to aid getting information from A to B.

But the real value isn't in the data itself, it's from the organization of the information within that data into useful knowledge. While the mere distribution of information is an important step to scaling human progress, it's also only part of the picture. The next step has typically been up to us, the human actors, to use our little brains to distill that information manually until we produce knowledge;

Tau is the first piece of serious technology that is aimed to not only automate the collection of information, but also the production of knowledge, unless you count Neflix's 'AI' recommending 'The Human Centipede' after your toddler has just watched 'A Bug's Life', as successful knowledge discovery made by a machine. Tau is about the industrialization of knowledge creation via taking some of the burden of logical reasoning from us humans and giving it to the machine.

What Can Tau Do?


Ohad has spent years researching and developing Tau. The design is centered around creating a self defining, decidable logic that is expressible under pspace (which is mathematically shown to be the most expressive any self defining and decidable language can be), that will act as a metalanguage for all programming languages defined under Tau.

A trivial example of what this can directly lead to is secure smart contracts. Smart contracts operating under Tau cannot ever give rise to something like the DAO hack - decidable programming languages means one can anticipate the entire spectrum of possible consequences of the code before running it, allowing us to avoid anything unintended. But reliable and secure smart contracts are only a tiny fraction of what the platform can truly offer.

The power of Tau's design will allow it to boast some truly wondrous features including:

  • Scalable social governance by automatically detecting consensus among its user base via their logical propositions rather than through voting which is mathematically flawed and inefficient
  • Scale human collaborative endeavors by organizing the individual propositions of large groups of experts in their respective fields and logically deducing new knowledge from these propositions
  • Synthesize code by automatically constructing code from its knowledge base according to the users specifications
  • and many more features further along like a knowledge market, automated virtual economy and an advanced derivatives market

Ohad has yet to fully explain how this will be achieved, but by far the most difficult part is creating the initial decidable, self defining logic system that serves as a metalanguage. Many had their doubts but yesterday Ohad announced that the first and most difficult step towards this end has been achieved. The code he has written is a working version of the Tau Meta Language which correctly computed a transitive closure graph. This is a proof of concept of the great things to come!

Now that the initial code is released, Ohad is working on a set of explanations about Tau which will outline it's features and how it'll be able to achieve them in more detail. Tau is notoriously difficult to explain, but it's definitely worth the effort to understand it. I'll keep you updated when his explanations are released.

Who Is The Lead Developer Ohad Asor?

Ohad Asor is a programmer, computer scientist, mathematician and logician from Israel. He attended university at the age of 13 and has extensive experience (30+ years) in programming and mathematics.

Most people know me as the clown on here who just writes jokes along the lines of taking his mom to the prom after his cousin rejected him or some shit, but I sat my university entrance exams at 16 and scored in the top 0.5% of Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank and took a prestigious course at a well known university. I only bring this up to show that I've had no shortage of dealings with what ordinarily would be considered to be extremely intelligent people, but Ohad is on a completely different level.

Ohad Asor is, quite frankly, the most intelligent and knowledgeable person with whom I've ever interacted. There are many geniuses and child prodigies out there, but Ohad has spent virtually every minute of his waking moments studying up until this point in his life, and he likely has an IQ of over 5 standard deviations above the mean to begin with. I have spoken to him and followed his project over the past 8 months, and my assessment and admiration of his abilities has only increased over this time period.

Here is a short video of him explaining the old design of Tau and some of its features. The information is dated as the new design is far superior, but these features remain.


English is Ohad's second language - His native language is C

How Do I Invest In Tau?

Tau itself has no tokens but Ohad is also building Agoras, the first automated marketplace over the Tau collaborative platform. Agoras tokens are currently traded on Bittrex. It has one of the fairest distributions in the cryptosphere and Ohad is only reserving 3% of the tokens for himself. None of that 20% for the founders, 10% for the developers, 20% for the foundation, 15% for the founders' penis enlargement fund bullshit.

Agoras has made considerable gains over the last few weeks but it's total market cap is still under 100 million at the time of writing, which, to me, represents an incredible opportunity for something potentially revolutionary. If we woke up tomorrow without Bitcoin, things would more or less continue as they did, but if we woke up tomorrow without electricity, the world would be an entirely different place. Indeed Tau aims to be the latter: a truly indispensable piece of technology, which is a status that no cyrpto project has yet reached.

This article isn't to be taken as investment advice any more than it is to be construed as advice on how to get out of the friend zone without resorting to chloroform. I'm not affiliated nor paid by the Tau team in any way. I have not made a single crypto recommendation in my 8 months of being here until now. I just wanted to share something that I think has immense potential to be truly revolutionary, and it also happens to be the only other crypto investment I hold other than Steem.

Feel free to ask some questions after and I'll try my best to answer them.

Special thanks to @dana-edwards and the Steemit platform for allowing me to discover this project


Resources
Tau Website
Telegram Chat
Github Repository
Agoras on Bittrex
Tau Reddit
Tau QQ Group Number: 203884141
IRC for technical questions only, Ohad will generally reply within a day

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Extremely well put. It was like reading my own thoughts right down to "I don't understand the tech but I know it sounds awesome!" Except due to my work load I haven't had time to stay on top of any of developments and had no idea why the price had spiked! Good to know!

AGRS has been one of my few recommendations in the space and I still continue to recommend it and largely for the reasons you highlighted: I invest in people and Ohad is clearly an amazing person who I have no doubt has assembled a world-class team. I'm happy to fund his hair-brained scheme even if it might not work, just like I was happy to fund Elon Musk's hair-brained schemes over the years.

Also shout out to @dana-edwards who brought this project to my attention, and no doubt many of us here on Steemit. This project is one of the few truly ambitious projects in the space and I'm happy to wait years for any kind of return on my investment.

Hey andrarchy, thanks for popping by

The price spike was due to the first release of working Tau Meta Language code on the github

He is truly going for something revolutionary here, and the guy is just a pure genius. Not much hair, but definitely a lot of brain, hair brained schemes or not :)

And yes, I added a shoutout to dana in the post, I can't believe I forgot it in the initial post. Steem and Tau are my only crypto investments. I truly expect great things from them.

Thanks for all the hard work Andy.

Hi @trafalgar
Awesome piece.
I'm a newbie here and I'd like you to check out my introductory post and upvote. Here's the link below. Thanks
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@berylwills/4egkse-about-me

TML is the most ambitious project I know of. What I learned from a quote from Bruce Lee (I remember you appreciate martial arts), is that one of the keys to his success was to aim high.

The quote:

“Don't fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.” - Bruce Lee

This holds very true. Whether we are talking about Facebook which had the extremely ambitious mission of making the world more connected, or Google to organize the world's information and make it useful, or Bitcoin to create peer to peer electronic cash. Tauchain and Tau has the kind of ambition where the reward for success of this project is a world changing impact.

TML being not just a language, but a meta language, allowing for advanced users to define and configure languages. This is something no other crypto project has even attempted.

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.

that's very difficult to say, but I'd imagine that knowledge creation through discussion and collaboration will scale immensely

right now, you can't effectively have a meeting of, say 500 experts on genetic engineering and expect the fruits of that discussion to be as efficient as 3 experts, due to a whole heap of reasons (only 1 person can talk at a time, we can't follow or remember multiple conversations etc) but over tau, collaborative discussions can scale logically through the platform.

This basically means human progress will be greatly accelerated. There's no 'AI' buzzword or anything here, its just how a logic engine will work. But tha'ts only 1 component of Tau.

It also offers automated code synthesis and automated virtual marketplace. One day over the network you won't have to make investment or business decisions, you can just give it a broad order like 'make me the most money possible' or 'contribute to the most egalitarian distribution of wealth possible' or 'do whatever you can to contribute to minimizing economic suffering in the world' and it can be automated

Sounds quite far fetched, but I think it has a non trivial chance of success. Wait for Ohad's explanations coming within a few weeks

Fascinating. This is just what the future needs to really be called one.

It sounds like the perfect technology for the T-9000 (either the Terminator or the Refrigerator).

haha sounds like one of those home gyms you hand on your door or something

but Tau is truly something else, doing a bit of research there might be the best thing you've ever done for yourself

it's the most ambitious and potentially revolutionary project out there and lead by the smartest guy i know

Wait a sec....for many moons Steem has been unfavored (akin to being slapped around like the forgotten & neglected step-child of crypto) by traders because of our vast complexities like 13 Weeks Powerdown, Steem To Vest Depreciating Ratio, Duality of SBD with its Interest Rates(Did somebody say negative interest soon?), Curation Payouts Decay & Arbitrary % Sharing 30min count down, Downvote Flagging Micro-Battles, and our (in)famous variations of upvote agendas which includes assortments of Circle-jerk, Self-jerk, Whale-jerk, Orca-jerk, Dolphin-jerk, Minnow-jerk, Bots-jerk, Swarm-of-Fake-Russian-Accounts-Following-Curation-Jerks, etc, Etc, ETC...And that's all before throwing in the monkey wrench of SMT Oracles into the mix!

But wait, correct me if I am mistaken, am I hearing that with tau all those fussy day traders will finally have the technology to predict the endless chaos and permutations of Steem unpredictable price factors empowering us to be the next crypto casino of choice togo to $10,000, yes?

Hell yeah...sign me up for some of that evolving redefining expert systems decision matrix thingamagic tau!

disclosure: benith all that absurdity I am already an owner of AGRS

haha no it cannot predict the market like that, although it will offer an advanced derivatives market in the future

steem is great, combining crypto with a social media website is a natural fit and i expect it to be one of the fastest growing platforms next year

tau is a different beast entirely. It's about scaling knowledge production and getting the machine to understand machine comprehensible language rather than just execute the code.

Oh I get it, I get, super realistic sex-bots(machines) that not just run sensual logic, but actually understands the damn instructions....straight out of the tau-blockchain by deriving the habitual mating media stimulus market and self-stimulating rituals by compiling the demands of human behavior when net-neutrality constrict porn download creating a suplus of pent up semen demand!

Sweet BeJezuz, I need it even more now!


net neutrality2.JPG

source: I would reference it but I suspect it's probably fake news. Still it's got some fun truth in jest ya? :)

Epic comment and pic!

100% upvoted. Thanks for the write up & will be looking forward to your follow up post!

Muuuah!

Hmmmm, very interesting. I like the fact that it's appears to be in it's own class as an investment. Something not of the norm these days. A logic based AI system has me intrigued and excited in a way but in another a bit weary? A good investment........ why not as tech. keeps marching forward this was sure to come to light. It's cheap enough to not worry with if it were to fail. The AI advancement is here to stay whether we like it or not as people all around the world are mining 24/7 consistently upgrading their operations essentially growing this intelligence daily. All the while the growing AI rewards the minors through coin and token payment advancing its own growth exponentially ............ I'll look into tau more as you have my attention. Great post! :)

yes, it's a logic based rather than a statistical based AI system
more strictly, it allows machine comprehensible languages to be defined under it, and it can extract propositions made with these languages into its knowledge base
then it can make logical deductions or piece together code in any machine comprehensible language defined under it

Its features are not even limited to this. Tau is quite amazing really. You can look at the code yourself.

Woww.. Very interesting.

Is Tau trading yet or in ICO? Sounds cool if Traf has invested in it i must say😎

It's trading on bittrex, the link is given on the bottom
I never ask people to do this as I don't expect it usually, but reading the full article might be the best decision you'll ever make in your life :)

I'll definitely give it a shot..

It is currently under automated maintenance. But it is traded under AGRS

I have so far avoided Bittrex. That might have to change.

there are problems with every exchange
and there are always risks holding it yourself too
but there's no getting around it for now
definitely worth looking into this project, by far the most revolutionary one I've come across and it's my only other investment besides steem

@trafalgar - Hmm, synthesizing knowledge from carefully organized and collected data. Sounds interesting and headed in the AI direction. Since AI is going to be big in future, this should be worth investing in. Will take a look at Tau and Agoras.
Thanks for the heads up. Upvoted

Regards,

@vm2904

it has every right to be called AI, but Ohad himself hates buzzwords and just wants to talk about the features in a tangible fashion

it's a logic based ai system, rather than a statistical approach, which Ohad he understands very well as he has years of experience in machine learning but deeps it unsuitable for this design

I can't praise his intelligence enough, the guy is truly something else

Thanks. That makes sense. Will do some follow up reading.

Have to admit to not fully - or even partly - understanding this, but I'm looking for one or two early projects to invest in so need to read further about this - could be a good contender!

Looks like it has rocketed in the last few days - along with everything else

Thanks for posting!

Tau/Agoras is a completely different beast to every other crypto project out there
it's on a completely different level
you'll definitely be doing yourself a favor looking into it in more detail

i'm willing to wager that looking deeper into this will be one of the best things you'll do for yourself in your life :)

Ok, I am all for doing good things for myself!

And I love a wager - how about we wager your Steem power for mine? ;-)

Cheers

Pretty much Japanese name :D

hahaha the name Tau is actually an ancient greek letter which means 2 pi or 'full circle'
its also the etymology of the word tautology meaning self definition

ohkay so we got it's background history too, awesome :D
Seems like Greeks were buying stuffs in cryptocurrencies before :D

.