> And, the majority of the interesting use cases for smart contracts require extrinsic (non-blockchain) state to operate. The price per barrel of Brent. Whether

> And, the majority of the interesting use cases for smart contracts require extrinsic (non-blockchain) state to operate. The price per barrel of Brent. Whether it rained over a piece of farmland. Randomness. Notice of the publication of a death certificate. All of these applications rely on a trusted server (or a federated system of them) for input. And they can be corrupted or shut down by a powerful adversary. Ethereum might be able to free itself from oracles to a small degree, but the difference will be negligible for many practical purposes. Interesting point, but can't randomness be read from hash of the next block? I'm not familiar with Ethereum's VM - does it not have access to that?