Hacker News Reader

Comment by brian_cloutier | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq. You're _never_ sure that your counter-party to some communication is who you think they are. The definition of the oracle problem you propose applies to almost the entirety of the modern world and would come up in conversation all the time.

TLS and other measures make me _very_ sure google.com is resolving to a server controlled by Google. A congress who wanted to do so could vote using hardware wallets and publish signatures and we could be just as sure that the blockchain reflected reality. A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality; ryan air could decide that the ethereum smart contract which manages bookings _is_ reality, then there would be no oracle problem even by your definition.

[1] or maybe it would require a constitutional change

View on HN

All the existing systems we have to solve this area are trust based systems. You trust your browser and OS to choose the correct CAs to trust, and they are the ones that validate to you that google.com is Google. Whole schtick of crypto folks is about reating trustless systems. It is trivial to add real world information to a blockchain if you have an authority that you trust, the oracle problem is how to do that when you don't.

Even the Congress example for who is president, we literally had a bunch of people certify fake election results last election and try to overthrow the US goverment. No matter how much you scream that one day the blockchain will be the reality, that goes agaisnt every single judicial and political system we have in the world, and if you disagree with it, I hope someday somebody doesn't hack your house away from you, cause then you will learn why all proper property systems have judicial systems with actual human beings running on human logic with power to do fixes.

> with power to do fixes.

the implication here is that those powers of the judicial system will always be used to do fixes in your favour. but if that optimism was shared by everyone, blockchains would have never been invented in the first place.

> That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq.

I don't follow, one of us is confused about what the other is saying and I'm not sure who. If the Oracle problem were solved tomorrow, one of the first things that would happen is publishing stock prices to ledgers so that derivatives could be implemented in smart contracts, yes?

Anyway, what I'm saying is, whatever real world data you'd like to have on a blockchain ledger, election results or stock prices or sports scores or whatever, the Oracle problem is specifically the fact that you wouldn't be able to trust it if it were there, not the fact that it isn't there yet.

> A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality

This is a workaround - if the value on the ledger is the source of truth, there is no Oracle problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com