Tau-Chain and Agoras Official Thread: Generalized P2P Network

[UrsaMajorisBeta]

Hi Ohad hope all is well.

I saw this website, https://lunyr.com/

"Lunyr is an Ethereum-based decentralized world knowledge base which rewards users with app tokens for peer-reviewing and contributing information"

Are they trying to do what you do using ethereum?

That sounds like Lbrary, some kind of wikipedia on the blockchain. I think that would fit as a "module" to the concept of tau, but nowhere near the whole system.

[1714200965]

1714200965

[ohad]

Hello Ohad.

How many developers are the TauChain project team? Are you developing your own or are there other participants?

Regarding the project What is the current state of the project?

right now im the only dev, but with a lot of help around (+5 people). the state is working on explanations (of the important parts, then move to code) and fortunately im not alone here. for more info can see on this thread.


as for lunyr, doesnt seem they have a way to price knowledge. and nonprecise pricing is a security hole, as it can be exploited. that'd be one tiny little point about lunyr

[Xaltotun]

What's up w/ Bittrex? Wallet has been under maintenance for days. 

[mightyMight]

What's up w/ Bittrex? Wallet has been under maintenance for days. 

I want to assume that those are constant updates delivered by Ohad and is a good sign of project progress

[ohad]

What's up w/ Bittrex? Wallet has been under maintenance for days. 

I want to assume that those are constant updates delivered by Ohad and is a good sign of project progress

they have a little wallet problem (txfees related) and they work with the omni team to fix it. i know because im subscribed to their communication (bittrex-omni)

[victorserrano]

I'm looking forward to having TauChain come out and be able to collaborate in the network.

As soon as the portfolio of Bittrex is fixed I will put my agoras tokens in Omni wallet

[victorserrano]

Hello Ohad, and creating the intelligent programming language TAU and the TauChain string is not a task too large for a single person ?. Then you have to develop Agoras smart market.

[ohad]

I'm looking forward to having TauChain come out and be able to collaborate in the network.

As soon as the portfolio of Bittrex is fixed I will put my agoras tokens in Omni wallet

i only develop a minimal core for collaborative development, based on discussions and logic. from there, i will be the least lonliest dev on the planet, and we all develop the final tau and agoras together

[mightyMight]

I'm looking forward to having TauChain come out and be able to collaborate in the network.

As soon as the portfolio of Bittrex is fixed I will put my agoras tokens in Omni wallet

How secure is it? I still don't like idea having coins laying around at a 3rd party places. At least not before i get my coins back from mt.gox, cryptsy, mintpal and all the other scammers.
Not saying Omni is a bad thing, just wondering how security is enforced.

[ohad]

I'm looking forward to having TauChain come out and be able to collaborate in the network.

As soon as the portfolio of Bittrex is fixed I will put my agoras tokens in Omni wallet

How secure is it? I still don't like idea having coins laying around at a 3rd party places. At least not before i get my coins back from mt.gox, cryptsy, mintpal and all the other scammers.
Not saying Omni is a bad thing, just wondering how security is enforced.

quite same way bitcoin is secured. omni is encoded over the bitcoin blockchain

[BTCspace]

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/qtums-block-size-limit-will-be-governed-by-smart-contracts-heres-how-cm794200

seems Qtum try to solve the same problems?


Qtum’s Block Size Limit Will Be Governed by Smart Contracts: Here’s How

Qtum is an up-and-coming smart contract platform set to launch in September of this year. Sometimes ambitiously referring to itself as "China's Ethereum," the project recently raised $15 million in three days through a successful crowdsale or "Initial Coin Offering" (ICO).
On a technical level, the Qtum blockchain will resemble Bitcoin, but will integrate an Ethereum-like Virtual Machine on top for smart contracting purposes. Additionally, Qtum is in the process of implementing a "Decentralized Governance Protocol" ( DGP ). This DGP will have smart contracts determine the blockchain's parameter selection, like its block size limit.

Jordan Earls, also known as "earlz" online, is the co-founder and lead developer of Qtum.


"We believe this will allow for Qtum to be the first self-modifiable, self-regulating and ultimately self-aware blockchain," he told Bitcoin Magazine .

 The Concept
Any blockchain has a number of parameters. In Bitcoin, this of course includes the 1 megabyte block size limit. But it also includes the block reward (currently 12.5), the block interval time (ten minutes) and more. These and three other parameters apply to Qtum as well.

But there are two basic problems with needing to have these parameters. First, they are very hard to get "right," in so far as that's even possible, since different parameters benefit different use cases. And second, in a decentralized system, these parameters can be very hard to change.

"The core rationale and problem we had when designing this is that we will release Qtum with some initial parameters that we try to make perfect," Earls told Bitcoin Magazine . "But we don't know what the ecosystem will look like one month after release, much less one year. So, we designed DGP. That way, we can tune the blockchain to be as usable and secure as possible without needing to fork, just to change a simple number from 1 to 2."

Qtum plans to realize this way of "tuning the blockchain" by doing what it does best: The DGP will consist of relatively straightforward smart contracts made up of blockchain-readable pieces of executable code.

"We have open-source smart contracts which implement the rules for changing the parameters, which will then be accepted by all nodes. It implements a fairly simple governance system of 'user keys' and 'admin keys.' There is a modifiable parameter in the contract which determines how many keys of each type must vote in order to approve a change to, say, the block size limit."

Importantly, through the use of smart contracts, these keys can actually represent more than just a regular user per key: Each key can represent a defined group.

"Perhaps one key represents a majority of hash power; or a key represents coin votes by coin holders; or a key acts according to a dynamic limit based on how full blocks are. Or even oracles: a key can effectively be controlled by people or servers that act based on input not directly readable by the blockchain itself, like USD market price for transaction fees. It's extremely flexible."

Qtum will almost certainly include smart contracts for the block size limit, the gas schedule to determine the price of different smart contract operations (for which Ethereum hard forked several times) and the minimum gas price. Additionally, it might deploy smart contracts for block interval times, block rewards, maximum gas per block and maximum script size or signature operations per transaction or block.

Changing the Rules
Embedding the parameter selection in smart contracts is clever and having all node software adjust accordingly even more so. However, an arguably even harder problem is not so much what parameter is decided on, but who gets to decide in the first place and how.

In Qtum, the initial parameters will be set by the developers based on their testing and measurements.

"For instance, we've already determined that a block size of 2 megabytes should be reasonable," Earls said.

After that, the initial set of rules to define the parameters can be changed themselves within the rules of the system, too.

A smart contract could, for example, start out relatively simple: It requires a majority of core developers to change the rules of the contract. Then, if a majority of core developers decides that instead of just developers, it should also include a majority of coin holders, the contract can be changed to a two-of-two multisig contract. From that moment on, one key would represent the developers, while the other key would represent the majority of coin holders. Next, if both developers and coin holders agree, hash power can have a seat at the table, too, and so forth.

As such, Qtum smart contracts can change not only the parameters of the system, but also how the parameters themselves can be changed.

That said, as Earls acknowledged, the Decentralized Governance Protocol can't actually solve all governance problems. It's specifically designed to make certain predefined parameters more easily adjustable, and it can indeed even change how these parameters can be adjusted to some extent.

But the Decentralized Governance Protocol does not and cannot apply to network rules that aren't among these predefined parameters. Protocol changes outside of these specific parameters would still require a typical upgrade mechanism, like a hard fork or a soft fork.

"I believe if Bitcoin had DGP technology, then we would still see all this fighting about SegWit vs Bitcoin Unlimited, etcetera," Earls acknowledged. "But, DGP would have been used in the meantime to increase the block size to something conservative but reasonable like 2 megabytes or 4 megabytes, to avoid all the transaction speed problems. Meanwhile, the developers and community could figure out a more permanent solution."

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.



Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/qtums-block-size-limit-will-be-governed-by-smart-contracts-heres-how-cm794200#ixzz4i7oULzFS

[mightyMight]

Sounds familair on some parts on others not. Btw. are you spamming all coin threads or is it just coincidence i saw the same on the SKY announcement one?

From the content what qtum is *not* or at least not named is:
- the language interface
- the non turing approach(qtum is based on ethereum)
- the knowledge base
- the ability to know if a statement is true or not

And probably much more.

Cheers
MM

[zooitje]

turing complete languages leave you helpless predicting what your code is going to do, except the "wait and see" way

Ohad, can you give us an example of this? Show us how it would work, because I don't understand how it works.

I can try to give you an analogy. Let's take cargo ships for instance.

Generalist ships can carry stuff of all shape and form with no restriction other than their size and weight limits: space rockets, airplanes, cranes, train wagons, whatever. It's cool because you can really carry anything. But it comes with its own difficulties: it's pretty much impossible to plan in advance how exactly you are going to arrange the things you need to load so that they will fit neatly and optimally and won't move during the trip. Sometimes your guys at the dock will manage to find a solution quick. Sometimes they'll have to load and unload things so many times that it seems like it takes forever. And that's when you don't have someone asking you to ship something so enormous that it blocks your docks for a week when you figure how to ship it at all. This type of ship is turing complete. In theory it could ship the moon. It could ship anything of any size if you have an infinitely large ship, and infinite number of dockers and an infinite amount of time. But in practice that doesn't really work like that, and the actual ships that end ups being used are all limited in size, and your docks have only that many cranes and that many dockers to help. Those ships are a watered down finite version of the real thing. So what happens with the real-life finite turing ships is that they work ok until it don't. And you can't really tell in advance when things are going to be smooth at the dock or when it will become really messy because the only way to decide how things gonna fit and what ship to use is to try to fit them in the ships. Of course there are many trivial shipments but the problem is you have no guarantees that a shipment will be easy to handle, difficult or downright impossible. But that's not the worse thing: the nightmare of turing-complete shippers is the outsourcing business, that is to say when another shipping company asks them to ship the cargo of their clients who may themselves be shipping companies outsourcing for other shipping companies and so on. Since they are all in the same business of turing-complete shipping as you are, they can't tell what the size of their cargo will be, and their clients don't know either etc. And if you yourself start to outsource unknowingly to one of the clients of one of your own client, that's where things start becoming self-referent and in some cases paradoxal, leading to capacity planning decisions that are sometime inconsistent.

Some other ships are specialized in carrying containers. They can carry only containers, and all the containers need to have exactly the same dimensions. No exception allowed. The containers are spacious, and inside the containers you can arrange things the way you want so it's not a problem for a large majority of the typical use cases. This type of ships is called total functional ships. The advantage is that even a 10-year-old could tell you just how many containers you can load on your ship if you give him the dimensions of the deck and the height limit so it's really easy to make sure that you always have the exact right capacity for your cargo, and your dock is working in continuous streaming loading container after container and ship after ship 24/7. But the problem is that you just can't carry anything larger than a container, making the shipping solution non-complete. Well, in fact there is a little secret: with some coordination you can carry anything of any size, but you'll need your customers to be smart and figure a way to breakdown the cargo into components that can fit in a container. You'll still be able to ship a plane, a rocket, the moon or even the whole infinite universe, but it will all have to be done in small parts, chunks and/or raw materials, that you will reassemble on the other end, effectively recovering the full expressiveness of what turing-complete ships are able to do, but over a controlled sequence of individual containers possibly carried by an infinity of ships. That requires a lot more thinking and engineering ahead of time than just shipping things piecemeal, but the reward is that at least at the time the cargo arrives at the dock, you don't have to worry that it could be too big to handle, and there is always a solution to the questions of how to load the cargo and how long it will take to your dockers to do the job. Like in the case of turing-complete shippers, you can also handle the outsourcing business of other containers shippers and outsource yourself, but since everybody can forecast what they are going to ship because nobody accepts cargo that's not already been quantified, it's impossible in the total functional shipping business to get requirements like "I will ship through you what is being shipped through me" but rather requirements like "I will ship 159 containers". This forced determination in relationships prevents the occurrence of self-referent cargo and guarantees that capacity planning leads to results that are always consistent.

In this analogy, Tau-Chain is a container ship company and Ethereum a generalist ship company.

Tau-chain can tell to its client how much their cargo will cost to ship, how long its gonna take and when a single ship isn't enough and will use all and any container ship available of any size regardless and manage to dispatch all the cargo optimally. It can make all sorts of predictions on the shipping like checking that weight is well balanced, or that temperature in the containers remains within a certain range etc. Clients can attach to containers  fast automated procedures called proofs which took them quite some time to prepare but that will allow to clear automatically and very fast custom, security, and quality controls at the arrival point so that the cargo can be deployed right away to its intended use and used on the spot. Another interesting aspect of Tau-chain is that it finds its container system (Tau) so good that the company decided to eat its own dog food and sequence itself in a continuously evolving series of its own containers with custom procedures to maintain its own integrity as it evolves.

Ethereum on the other hand can't quite tell in advance just how big a ship will be needed for any specific cargo nor if it will fit at all in any ship, so what it does is to let the client decide themselves what size of ship they want to use (the client would typically simulate a dock in his backyard to try to predict what volume his cargo could take) and make them pay for the service in advance. When the cargo arrives at the dock, if it fits in the planned ship Ethereum sends the ship even if it's not full. And if the cargo doesn't fit, it's just thrown in the sea. Either way they keep the money. Cargo doesn't come with any sort of automated clearance test, so it's up to their intended users to figure if the cargo is correct and have it pass all clearance tests before they can use it safely (which is never entirely certain as the case of the DAO has shown).

I hope this analogy helps making these computing paradigms less abstract. There are many approximations and concepts that I had to stretch to makes them work with the analogy and are not really exact but that should give a rough idea of the differences, and how these affect the distributed computers that implement them.

After the response on reddit by 'just some guy' i'm interested in what experts here think about this (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6doeqc/what_does_ethroll_take_so_long/di53vny/):

Cargo doesn't come with any sort of automated clearance test, so it's up to their intended users to figure if the cargo is correct and have it pass all clearance tests before they can use it safely (which is never entirely certain as the case of the DAO has shown).

vbuterin: I really have to push back against this part of the description. The vast majority of attacks against smart contracts, and smart contract bugs, have nothing whatsoever to do with the Turing complete versus bounded execution dichotomy.

[ohad]

see this recent long comment https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=950309.msg19013910#msg19013910
which explains also why the machine being bounded has almost nothing to do with decidability.
vitalik was not right here.
only under decidable language you're promised to get answers to YOUR questions. not someone else's questions!!

[BTCspace]

Sounds familair on some parts on others not. Btw. are you spamming all coin threads or is it just coincidence i saw the same on the SKY announcement one?

From the content what qtum is *not* or at least not named is:
- the language interface
- the non turing approach(qtum is based on ethereum)
- the knowledge base
- the ability to know if a statement is true or not

And probably much more.

Cheers
MM

thank you for the explain MM

i am holding some TAU

i just hope oneday TAU can be as big as Ethereum.

i do not know when, but i hope maybe in 2-3 years.

i brought tau because i love it.

[onetwo12]

35   Byteball Byteball   $61,942,768   $327.25   189,284 GBYTE *   $136,613   +14.31%   


byteball will be top10 in 1 year.

yeah, if people actually will start using it for buying/selling goods and if it gets listed on some more exchanges,
it could get even top 3. blackbytes will be up too if dnm's adopt it, I even recall someone saying its cryptocurrency 3.0
because of DAG and how consensus works

Byteball is actually the true cryptocurrency 2.0. Ethereum and other similar shitcoins only flirt with the idea of being 2.0 while in reality they are all the same old same old block chain based token systems. No innovation. Turing completeness does not make a coin magically a level higher than Bitcoin and certainly there is nothing innovative about Turing completeness. The guy died in 1954 anyway. So far Turing completeness has made more people suffer than it has done any good in the smart contracts space. It's ridiculous.

i have to say you have a good point!

why i have the feeling one day byteball will replace that Ethereum?

lol



this guy have a good point!

Ethereum maybe replaced by some other coins in 2-3 years.

is this a good point?

[UrsaMajorisBeta]

turing complete languages leave you helpless predicting what your code is going to do, except the "wait and see" way

Ohad, can you give us an example of this? Show us how it would work, because I don't understand how it works.

I can try to give you an analogy. Let's take cargo ships for instance.

Generalist ships can carry stuff of all shape and form with no restriction other than their size and weight limits: space rockets, airplanes, cranes, train wagons, whatever. It's cool because you can really carry anything. But it comes with its own difficulties: it's pretty much impossible to plan in advance how exactly you are going to arrange the things you need to load so that they will fit neatly and optimally and won't move during the trip. Sometimes your guys at the dock will manage to find a solution quick. Sometimes they'll have to load and unload things so many times that it seems like it takes forever. And that's when you don't have someone asking you to ship something so enormous that it blocks your docks for a week when you figure how to ship it at all. This type of ship is turing complete. In theory it could ship the moon. It could ship anything of any size if you have an infinitely large ship, and infinite number of dockers and an infinite amount of time. But in practice that doesn't really work like that, and the actual ships that end ups being used are all limited in size, and your docks have only that many cranes and that many dockers to help. Those ships are a watered down finite version of the real thing. So what happens with the real-life finite turing ships is that they work ok until it don't. And you can't really tell in advance when things are going to be smooth at the dock or when it will become really messy because the only way to decide how things gonna fit and what ship to use is to try to fit them in the ships. Of course there are many trivial shipments but the problem is you have no guarantees that a shipment will be easy to handle, difficult or downright impossible. But that's not the worse thing: the nightmare of turing-complete shippers is the outsourcing business, that is to say when another shipping company asks them to ship the cargo of their clients who may themselves be shipping companies outsourcing for other shipping companies and so on. Since they are all in the same business of turing-complete shipping as you are, they can't tell what the size of their cargo will be, and their clients don't know either etc. And if you yourself start to outsource unknowingly to one of the clients of one of your own client, that's where things start becoming self-referent and in some cases paradoxal, leading to capacity planning decisions that are sometime inconsistent.

Some other ships are specialized in carrying containers. They can carry only containers, and all the containers need to have exactly the same dimensions. No exception allowed. The containers are spacious, and inside the containers you can arrange things the way you want so it's not a problem for a large majority of the typical use cases. This type of ships is called total functional ships. The advantage is that even a 10-year-old could tell you just how many containers you can load on your ship if you give him the dimensions of the deck and the height limit so it's really easy to make sure that you always have the exact right capacity for your cargo, and your dock is working in continuous streaming loading container after container and ship after ship 24/7. But the problem is that you just can't carry anything larger than a container, making the shipping solution non-complete. Well, in fact there is a little secret: with some coordination you can carry anything of any size, but you'll need your customers to be smart and figure a way to breakdown the cargo into components that can fit in a container. You'll still be able to ship a plane, a rocket, the moon or even the whole infinite universe, but it will all have to be done in small parts, chunks and/or raw materials, that you will reassemble on the other end, effectively recovering the full expressiveness of what turing-complete ships are able to do, but over a controlled sequence of individual containers possibly carried by an infinity of ships. That requires a lot more thinking and engineering ahead of time than just shipping things piecemeal, but the reward is that at least at the time the cargo arrives at the dock, you don't have to worry that it could be too big to handle, and there is always a solution to the questions of how to load the cargo and how long it will take to your dockers to do the job. Like in the case of turing-complete shippers, you can also handle the outsourcing business of other containers shippers and outsource yourself, but since everybody can forecast what they are going to ship because nobody accepts cargo that's not already been quantified, it's impossible in the total functional shipping business to get requirements like "I will ship through you what is being shipped through me" but rather requirements like "I will ship 159 containers". This forced determination in relationships prevents the occurrence of self-referent cargo and guarantees that capacity planning leads to results that are always consistent.

In this analogy, Tau-Chain is a container ship company and Ethereum a generalist ship company.

Tau-chain can tell to its client how much their cargo will cost to ship, how long its gonna take and when a single ship isn't enough and will use all and any container ship available of any size regardless and manage to dispatch all the cargo optimally. It can make all sorts of predictions on the shipping like checking that weight is well balanced, or that temperature in the containers remains within a certain range etc. Clients can attach to containers  fast automated procedures called proofs which took them quite some time to prepare but that will allow to clear automatically and very fast custom, security, and quality controls at the arrival point so that the cargo can be deployed right away to its intended use and used on the spot. Another interesting aspect of Tau-chain is that it finds its container system (Tau) so good that the company decided to eat its own dog food and sequence itself in a continuously evolving series of its own containers with custom procedures to maintain its own integrity as it evolves.

Ethereum on the other hand can't quite tell in advance just how big a ship will be needed for any specific cargo nor if it will fit at all in any ship, so what it does is to let the client decide themselves what size of ship they want to use (the client would typically simulate a dock in his backyard to try to predict what volume his cargo could take) and make them pay for the service in advance. When the cargo arrives at the dock, if it fits in the planned ship Ethereum sends the ship even if it's not full. And if the cargo doesn't fit, it's just thrown in the sea. Either way they keep the money. Cargo doesn't come with any sort of automated clearance test, so it's up to their intended users to figure if the cargo is correct and have it pass all clearance tests before they can use it safely (which is never entirely certain as the case of the DAO has shown).

I hope this analogy helps making these computing paradigms less abstract. There are many approximations and concepts that I had to stretch to makes them work with the analogy and are not really exact but that should give a rough idea of the differences, and how these affect the distributed computers that implement them.

After the response on reddit by 'just some guy' i'm interested in what experts here think about this (https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6doeqc/what_does_ethroll_take_so_long/di53vny/):

Cargo doesn't come with any sort of automated clearance test, so it's up to their intended users to figure if the cargo is correct and have it pass all clearance tests before they can use it safely (which is never entirely certain as the case of the DAO has shown).

vbuterin: I really have to push back against this part of the description. The vast majority of attacks against smart contracts, and smart contract bugs, have nothing whatsoever to do with the Turing complete versus bounded execution dichotomy.

Thanks for sharing, this was quite clarifying. I wonder if there are posts like this which also deserve to be bumped.

[ohad]

in the first of july, one month from now, the price of direct sale will be doubled, for two reasons:
1. right now it's more expensive on bittrex than on direct sale, and we want to "clear the way up" on the exchange, to let more people be able to cash out and tokens to replace hands, and the price to rise. besides it's not fair that uninformed buyers pay more than they should when they buy on bittrex.
2. im flooded with "contact us" so i better refer them all to bittrex (at least until the price catches up)

[Cibervision]

Good news for investors, and fair play for newbies , great idea ohad.

[Cibervision]

Ohad, the  erc20 of ethereum will  be a standar, many of the world big companys are on the ethereum alliance, and all sidechain of ethereum work whit it, you think create agoras in this standar or create some bridge or tauchain will no can work with other blockchains like ethereum and its sidechains?