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At that point can they really be considered purely code contracts anymore? If their execution requires a trusted third party some of the rhetoric goes out the w
by nieve 5y ago
At that point can they really be considered purely code contracts anymore? If their execution requires a trusted third party some of the rhetoric goes out the window.
- lifeformed 5y agoI think they're just other smart contacts that use many data sources. Like if you wanted an oracle that returned the result of a baseball game, you'd have it check various newspaper websites and have it make sure the results were all the same. To attack it, you'd have to attack all the newspaper sources. It's still a weak point, but not quite a single point of failure.
- chrisco255 5y agoThey're sort of hybrid networks at that point, but Chainlink oracles are decentralized: each function is run by several nodes (31 for the BTC/USD or ETH/USD price feed, for example). The nodes have to come to consensus and individual nodes are slashed if they produce bad or late data. You can see an example of a LINK feed here: https://data.chain.link/ethereum/mainnet/crypto-usd/eth-usd https://data.chain.link/ethereum/mainnet/crypto-usd/eth-usd Decentralization is a spectrum. But I would argue this approach is far more secure than naive oracle implementations. Not all applications need oracles. It depends on whether your smart contract needs information about the world outside of the blockchain.
- ric2b 5y agoWho owns those 31 nodes? Who gets to choose which nodes are part of the calculation?