Tauchain (AGRS) AMA with Bittrex

We’re happy to announce that last week, Agoras Token (AGRS) has been relisted on Bittrex Global. You now can use the exchange to trade AGRS for both BTC and USDT.

As part of the relisting, we’ve held an AMA via the Telegram channel of Bittrex Global to introduce our project in more detail to their community. Don’t worry if you weren’t able to participate in the AMA — We hereby provide you with a complete overview of the event:

What is Tauchain & AGRS?

Tauchain, still underdevelopment, is an intelligent, self-amending social network. It’s the first software that is truly controlled by its users, and takes the form of a discussion platform in a p2p network. By that it allows a blockchain network that requires no centralized development team, and the developers are no one else but the users. Users say what they want Tau to be like on its next version, and Tau changes itself according to the users’ consensus. AGRS is the cryptocurrency used for trading formalized and unformalized knowledge directly over the Agoras knowledge economy based on Tauchain, among other supporting uses.

Tauchain enables you to participate in large-scale discussions and decision making both actively and even passively without you having to be present. This is possible by introducing our new communication paradigm called “Human-Machine-Human Communication”, in which by speaking in formal languages, the network can understand what’s being said. Thus, Tauchain learns from the user, becomes intelligent and can on behalf of the user automatically represent his opinions, ideas and knowledge in discussions, as well as generate an income for the user by doing so.

Which innovations do you bring to the blockchain world?

Tauchain is the first self-amending blockchain enabled by truly decentralized governance. As a result, its users are fully in control over the blockchain. This innovation as for itself encapsulates all existing and even future innovations: whenever a new idea comes up in the blockchain world, users will be able to simply make tau adopt that idea. It is therefore a truly evolving system, for the first time.

Which uses does the technology have outside of the blockchain world?

Many. All aspects of managing large networks of human communication, e.g. in large corporations, states, and academics. It is maybe the first project that has the potential to bring the benefits of logic-based AI to mainstream and widespread use. It also presents a new collaborative software development paradigm that can be adopted by any software out there. Tau and Agoras are truly world-saving products by allowing to combine brain powers in the large.

Tell us about smart contracts

Thanks to Tau’s ability to deal with knowledge formalized in logical languages, and its emphasis on the mathematical property so-called decidability (in contrast to Turing-completeness), contracts written over tau can be really smart: the machine can answer all questions regarding them, e.g. what will happen in certain scenarios, or give guarantees that certain undesired outcomes will never take place.

Which real-world problems does Tauchain solve?

Tauchain solves some of the greatest problems of humanity to date: How can 100, let alone 1,000 or 1,000,000 people have a meaningful discussion? Currently, this is simply impossible.

With Tauchain, any number of people can have a highly efficient discussion as the network is able to understand what is being said (because people will write in machine-comprehensible languages) and therefore can automatically calculate the opinion map and consensus. By doing so, it also solves large-scale decision making: Currently, large-scale decision making is done by voting, but voting is not good enough, as even though it’s possible to give everyone an equal right to vote, it is still impossible to practically give everyone an equal right to propose what to vote over, because, who is going to even read a million proposals a day? On Tau, users simply say what they have to say, in formal languages, and the opinion map is calculated automatically by the system.

We also solve the issue of not being able to trade specific pieces of knowledge directly. Today, people monetize knowledge only by very indirect means. Using AGRS the system can automatically match demand and supply of knowledge, leaving no good idea neglected any more.

I want to support your project, Tell us more about the Supporter Program and in what ways can we participate ?

Indeed we just launched the Tau Supporter Program as an initiative to reward proactive support for the project. As part of the program, a maximum amount of 200,000 AGRS will be available to win over the course of three months. By completing challenges, Supporters climb up the leaderboard to secure their share of the allocated rewards. We welcome anyone interested in applying to become a Tau Supporter so we can start shaping the future together. Use this link to apply.

How do you see the future? In which way will Tau have an impact on society?

Once Tauchain is mature, it will find integration into most people’s everyday lives and greatly advance progress of humanity in many different ways. Imagine being able to create a digital version of yourself which you feed your knowledge and ideas to. The digital version of yourself understands you and will be able to participate in discussions for you and trade knowledge for cash on your behalf. Naturally, this results in many people being able to enjoy the benefits of this technology. Imagine you suddenly can have 1,000+ experts of any kind, say doctors, come together to efficiently discuss certain problems and their potential solutions. The ability to combine brain power at such a large scale creates a much more efficient way for our civilization to find solutions to the most pressing problems we’re facing today.

On another level, states will be able to use Tauchain’s capabilities to establish governance models truly based on decentralized governance, which ultimately leads us to a more democratic future.

Furthermore, since as a byproduct of using the system, the system becomes smart and knowledgeable, we expect it to be the fastest and most fair route to the singularity. This however will of course not happen overnight.

Could you please tell me just a little more about the team and some of their backgrounds? I have personally seen many projects launch with inexperienced team members, and some of those didn’t go so well due to easily avoidable mistakes.

We are a team of about 15 highly dedicated individuals looking to make this project a success. Our founder, Ohad Asor, is a Software Developer and Mathematician who has been involved with top tech companies in Israel since 1995. He was the youngest university student in Israel, studying Mathematics and Computer Science at age 13. Over the years he has accumulated extensive knowledge and experience in programming and various areas of math, with recent focus on logic, machine learning, complexity theory, philosophy of science, economics, social choice, and decentralized networks. He designed and implemented large parts of Tau and Agoras. As the founder, he is currently leading the development of the project.

But even beyond that, our team is top notch. With Prof. Franconi, we’re engaging one of the world’s most known experts in the field of Knowledge Representation and with Prof. Benzmüller, one of the world’s leading experts in the field of Higher Order Logic and automated theorem provers being part of our team, we’re making sure our solution lives up to our promises. Besides them we have two more PhD holders in the team (Juan and Umar). We also have Karim, a successful serial entrepreneur, as an R&D manager. And the list goes on.

What’s been already accomplished from the roadmap?

The hardest part, which is the logical engine, in the form of TML. We also almost finished a platform for trading freestyle (unformalized) knowledge in the form of video calls paid by the minute.

What is still left to be done?

TML (Tau Meta-Language) is an impressive logical engine but still lacks some parts to make it adequate for being served as a language to write translators. Agoras Live, which is the mentioned video calls platform, is at the testing phase. Aside that we’ll have to implement the discussion platform and the self amending blockchain. This covers almost everything.

What security features will be implemented in Agoras to prevent hacking due to errors in smart contracts. Are they audited frequently to identify vulnerabilities?

As opposed to other blockchains such as Ethereum, Tauchain is based on decidable logic in a turing incomplete environment. In Ethereum any computation is allowed, even if its intention is to harm the network, while Tauchain computations over the network can be restricted to secure computations only, by whatever definition of security the users supply. So everything on Tau can be made correct-by-construction including secure-by-construction.

Governance is one of the topics most paid attention by the communities, how does Agoras plan to exploit this topic?

Tauchain is the first fully user-controlled blockchain or even software. Once launched, Tauchain’s governance will be completely in the hands of the users. We came up with a new communication paradigm called Human-Machine-Human communication, in which by using formal languages, users can make the network understand their opinions and ideas. The network then is able to automatically calculate the consensus of the users from their discussions and automatically upgrades itself with each new block according to that consensus.

Do the token holders have the right to participate in the governance of the project? On what kind of decisions can they vote on about the project?

This is to be decided by the users themselves.

Although ETH 2.0 is delayed to next year, it will solve all existing problems of ETH and become the best choice for dApps in future, so do you think this is a threat for your project and how could you overcome this barrier?

Tauchain & Agoras goes way beyond what Ethereum will ever be able to achieve, they are completely incomparable. In fact no other project, blockchain or not, is even close to what we do here. To name a few features which blockchains like Ethereum can only dream of: self amendment, logical guarantees, scaling discussions, and a knowledge economy.

It can be said that DeFi and Dapps are the two pillars prepared to dominate 2020 in the crypto space, what is your approach to DeFi and Dapps. What role do you play in DeFi innovation?

Tau and Agoras are many steps ahead of current DeFi and Dapps. Tau’s contracts can be very general, allowing contracts that refer to knowledge, financial derivatives, computational resources, and more, all combined. They can also be trusted in much higher confidence level than common code, especially Turing complete code. Two examples of holistic applications that can be developed over the system, and are described in the whitepaper, are a decentralized search engine, and an automatic businessman.

TAU build the Tau Meta Language (TML), can you tell us about Tau Meta Language (TML) ? Why does TAU build the TML instead of use another language?

TML (Tau Meta-Language) is a language intended to bootstrap Tau’s Internet of Languages. We described how the system depends on formal languages, but there will not be a single universal language. Users will be able to add new languages and make languages evolve over time. TML is a tool for writing translators from one language to another, and by that making Tau language-independent to a large extent. In addition to that, TML is a logical solver that satisfies mathematical properties required in order to support the setting of decidable self-amendment as well as reasonable contracts. By that it can serve as an “assembly language” for the various knowledge-representation languages to be supported over the network.

AI has been included in many areas at present, but the highest level of refinement has not yet been achieved. How do you handle this reality at Agoras ? In case the network does not make a good identification of the candidate, what guarantees do you offer to the associated companies?

Artificial intelligence so far hasn’t lived up to its expectations because most often, people focus on the machine learning side of AI, which is probabilistic, approximate and without justifications and proofs, as well as dealing with quantitative data while being inadequate for qualitative data. Logic-based artificial intelligence on the other hand is accurate, absolute and capable of much more than machine learning (and can also do machine learning). With Tauchain and AGRS, we therefore focus on logic-based artificial intelligence. We aim to become the Google, Facebook, and Bitcoin, of logic-based AI.

We hope you’ve enjoyed the AMA and that we’ve been able to help you better grasp the vision and potential of Tauchain & AGRS.

For more information, we welcome you to join our Telegram channel and have a deeper look into our whitepaper.

Thanks
Kilian
IDNI Community Manager
www.idni.org