What is the difference between rootchain and sidechains? I'm trying to understand how important it is to have really strong and efficient governance for the rootchain. If the rootchain doesn't include anything else besides the tau language and some p2p-functions to make it decentralized, the governance isn't probably a big thing because there will be very few decisions to make. Some upgrades sometimes, but if the system is very well designed, this won't happen often. If pretty much all action happens in the sidechains, then most users don't need to care about rootchain. Only thing that they care is that there won't be any changes that break their sidechain operations.

You might be overestimating the willingness of humans to collaborate peacefully over the rules of Tauchain. As we have seen many times in the cryptosphere, people fight over stupid things. Most people are not willing to use logic and rationality to form consensus. That's why I think it's important that there is a clear goal for Tauchain. When it's ready, how it will look like? When you know the goal, you can design the governance machanism to support that goal. The purpose of governance is to make sure that Tauchain achieves the goal (even when many of the participants are ignorant and irrational).


I was mostly thinking what makes Tauchain different from all other smartcontract platforms. At least it should be the most secure – when the smart contract is written in tau language, users can be sure that it works exactly like it's meant to work. Right?

But what are the usecases for Tauchain? What is it really good for, so that people will choose it over other alternatives? Is it easier, cheaper, or faster? Does it offer better functionality? Is it easier to make more complicated smartcontracts? What is the "unfair advantage" of Tauchain?

I have a few potential ideas for DAO/DAC. Tauchain is one of the most interesting platforms currently, mostly because of Agoras. If I can easily reuse existing code and hire programmers to write new code in a marketplace, it might offer a great way to develop something that actually works. I could just define what the DAO should do and use Agoras to hire somebody to combine existing code or write new functions so that I have the business logic. Then I can just focus on branding and marketing.

Another potentially interesting thing is to use AI with DAOs. It won't happen soon, but it's interesting to think how to replace piece by piece some things where humans are needed for DAO. It seems that Tau might be the best platform to enable this. In the beginning it will be only small things, but over time it could evolve to something really interesting.

BTW, this is a great short video about DAO/DAC perspective for blockchains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG-CcbtwKKU

I've found the DAO perspective to be extremely helpful to think about governance and long term future of blockchain projects. Too many projects start with ambitious hopes but not enough disciplined thinking about what it actually takes to have a virtual organization that can survive (and preferably thrive) over long periods of time.


Are there any real world usecases for this? Usually people are very irrational and don't want to do this kind of stuff. They rather keep their contradictory beliefs. It's very small group of people who want to have anything to do with logical knowledge accumulation. Even many scientists are really bad at rationality.

This goes a little bit over my head. How can normal people use this system to do something?

Anyways, finally I took some time to try to understand better this project and skimmed through this whole topic. So here are some random thoughts and questions.

1. Would you call Tauchain a DAO? It's decentralized (maybe not in the beginning, but it aims to be in the future), it's autonomous, but is it something that you can call "organization"?

If the answer is yes, you might be able use it to explain better what Tauchain is and what it does. It also helps to think more clearly how the governance system should be designed.

A DAO needs help from humans to make decision (not enough AI yet). How it will listen and use the human input? Somebody has to have power over the rules. In the beginning it's good to centralize decision making power to developers, because they know the best how the system works. But in the long run it's probably best to decentralize the decision making power to make sure that the DAO will stay resilient.

It's important to make difference between decentralization of existence and ruling power. Decentralization of existence is really important to make sure that the DAO will keep running even when many of the computers it exists on will be shut down for some reason. Decentralization of ruling power over the rules and decisions of the blockchain is different thing. In the beginning it's probably even a bad idea because it's dangerous to have too many ignorant rulers.

We can also have different roles in decentralization of existence. In traditional blockchains there are block producers and nodes. Apparently Tauchain will also have a blockchain, so there needs to be rules who will produce the next block and how they will get rewarded. If there is lot of data that everybody needs, there might be a need to incentivize some nodes, too.

2. How Tauchain will work from the user perspective? If I fire up a Tau client, what do I have? What can I do with it? For example, what if I want to create a new DAO for some purpose. How it will be done in practice? It will probably need a blockchain or some other secure way of saving data and making transactions? Do I have to code everything or can I just use some existing codebase and blockchain?

3. Is it possible to use Tau language in offline computer, just like any other programming language? Would it make sense to publish the language first, let people play with it and make sure it works, and then launch Tauchain?

So basically this would be a formalized negotiation process for several participants in a blockchain?