Hi Ohad,

I read your roadmap for Tau, and am glad that you are repositionning your strategy toward a more inclusive bottom-up approach, and prioritizing the creation of collaborative tools for the community to start familiarizing itself with the specific programming paradigm used by Tau, as well as starting building models and applications. As discussed earlier, I think that we shouldn't be looking to create a collaborative environment only around Tau, but instead create an open platform in collaboration with other RDF-based self-amending crypto ledger such as Autonomic and even possibly Tezos if they get around to supporting RDF and OWL. There are several reasons to that. Let me re-iterate on that.

First, as the very slow progress of Tau has shown, this is a significant undertaking. Much more significant than you cared to admit initially. And it's paramount to use the little resources we have as a community intelligently by staying focused on building our common vision together rather than wasting time and resources building separate competing ecosystems.

From an economic and game theory perspective, it also doesn't make any sense to compete at infrastructure level since none of the economic incentives are connected to the underlying infrastructure, be it Tau or Autonomic. Should Autonomic make it first to market by a large margin, regardless of its relative qualities and shortcomings as per your and HMC's respective views, the obvious right thing to do (that all investors will rightfully require) will be to start building Agora on Autonomic, and later migrate it to Tau should Tau turn out to be a better fit. Basically, putting aside petty ego matters, it's in everybody's best interest that Tau and / or Autonomic make it to market asap, and that the whole ecosystem that was meant to come on top be equally suitable for either logical substrate.

But most importantly, as per my earlier argument that still stands unchallenged: no matter how different the underlying form of calculus, there exists a low enough abstraction level from which the code will be the same above which everything that's written for one of the platforms will work seamlessly on the other. One obvious argument that demonstrates this is the fact both projects claim to be able to recover OWL, if not directly at core-logic level due to different tradeoffs on expressiveness, at least at the level of the blockchain where unbounded iteration or arithmetic is recovered by continuation over a series of blocks. This at the very least establishes the fact that everything in the system that will be written using OWL can be shared between the projects. Although OWL has a limited expressiveness and isn't suitable to express complex behaviors, a huge amount of what a typical program intended for human consumption does isn't computational in nature and lands itself very well to being encoded as ontologies and linked-data sets in dynamic contexts. That means that the computational part that may involve different operations and patterns in MSOL and MLTT can be factorized out in a core-logic library that would be specific to each project with everything else written as generic OWL and shared. This is precisely what BOSCoin is doing by introducing a time-constrained FSM (TAL) to deal with all the stuff that OWL isn't able to express. BOSCoin may not be a "self-amending" / "self-evolving" ledger as advertised, but it got at least that part right: most of the stuff can be factorized out of the core logic and put in OWL format where it can be universally shared with other projects, and thanks to which it can reuse a lot of the already existing ontologies and datasets that have been created by experts of all fields in the scope of the Semantic Web initiative. Should Autonomic and Tau decide to build a common ecosystem using as much as possible existing Semantic Web standards for everything non-computational, we would be able to leverage all the tools developed for the Semantic Web like Protege, hire experienced ontologists from the Semantic Web community, and even start prototyping our stuff using a "naive Tau" approach by leveraging existing OWL reasoners like Fact++ or even BOSCoin's OWL+TAL engine when they deliver it.

A last argument that should clearly establish the need for a common ecosystem of generic programs is that in all likelihood neither of MLTT or MSOL are the silver bullet, the characteristica universalis sought after as the holy grail of logic. As research keeps making progress, even better calculi will be discovered that get always closer to the proverbial metal that the fabric of reality is made of, and we will want Tau / Autonomic to follow to get closer to the metal too. What is a "better" calculus? It could be something with a better balance of expressiveness and decidability. But it could also be a form of logic that allows to express programs as shorter strings, allowing to compress the entire Tau universe and bring it closer to kolmogorov complexity which is very likely to become the name of the game anyway as Tau starts looking for a useful form of Proof-of-Work and Agora brings online swaths of idle computing resources begging to be arbitraged.

If we have worked in silos with separate watertight ecosystems and programs infused with bits and pieces of the specific core logic they were designed to run on, neither Tau nor Autonomic will be able to upgrade when a better form of calculus is discovered and it will take yet another team and yet another project to fill the gap, leading to even more fragmentation of the industry and a general lose/lose for everyone involved.

I know I'm partially repeating myself. I know this is a touchy question. I know egos are involved and still scalded by the earlier dispute.
But this time around I really hope to get a substanciated answer - if not from both sides, at least of you Ohad - as of why I'm wrong, and why we should keep ignoring the other project in spite of the fact both projects have the same noble and philantropic goals, and only diverging views on technical aspects that, in hindsight, aren't all that important after all. Again, why not just burry the hatchet and admit that Tau has got two equally valid and promising research initiatives - which everyone else would consider to be an advantage - that could happily cohabit within a common higher level framework, with the community actively building on it? Even OWL has got many different subsets corresponding to different forms of logic and I'm not seeing anyone at the W3C making a fuss about it.

We have to design Tau as a calculus-agnostic project and get back the Autonomic folks on board. This is the only way for Tau to live up to its ambitions of universality. Ohad, HMC, any comments?