Something Revolutionary In the Crypto Space
The overwhelming majority of new crypto projects out there fall into 3 main categories:
- A pure currency with a twist, be it anonymity, speed, no transactions fees, no transactions at all etc.
- 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.
- 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.
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