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Agree and disagree. Yes, you’re right that in many cases you have to rely on an external oracle, so a protocol can’t be fully “trustless”. However the differen

Agree and disagree. Yes, you’re right that in many cases you have to rely on an external oracle, so a protocol can’t be fully “trustless”. However the difference is that we can abstract away the oracle from the rest of the value transfer mechanism. For example if we want to bet on the winner of the Super Bowl, in the old days we’d have to find a trusted third party to hold the money for us. Essentially a bookie. Finding a trusted bookie, especially one who’s licensed in multiple jurisdictions is really hard. In contrast, we can probably find a trusted “oracle” for the Super Bowl much easier. For example AP is extremely trustworthy (largely because they’re not in the legally dodgy business of sports betting). As long as AP cryptographically signs the outcome of the game (as they do for all HTTPS served content), we now have a highly trusted oracle. We can handle all the other mechanics around betting and payoffs inside a trustless smart contract. In fact we can take this even a step further and use multiple trusted sources in a multisig setup. The chance that AP, ESPN, NBC sports and Google all collude to lie about the Super Bowl is extremely small. So while the oracle problem means we can’t completely eliminate the need for trust, it can drastically reduce the surface area of risk by abstracting away the informational layer from the value transference layer.

imustbeevil 4y ago
> Finding a trusted bookie, especially one who’s licensed in multiple jurisdictions is really hard. Anywhere that it is legal, it is significantly easier than dealing with any blockchain. What you've stumbled upon is the reality that the only feature cryptocurrencies provide is opaque law enforcement, and that feature has a timer. Why would it be any easier for a blockchain to be licensed in multiple jurisdictions? The only difference is that the blockchains are almost definitely not licensed. I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is, but I feel like a blockchain holding accounts of illegal gambling is a pretty weird thing to want to create immutable records of, unless you're the FBI.
Workaccount2 4y ago
The problem is that it inherently places an ever growing bounty on corrupting those "trusted" sources which are in fact human, not cryptographic. The bounty in crypto is only in cracking whatever chosen cryptography, and this is the very heart of crypto's provably rock solid trust. This bounty is worth trillions, but we known with a (very) high level of certainty that no one can claim it. You would have to have broken cryptography, or developed a sci-fi level computer chip in total secret. How much can you trust a handful of news sources when the bounty for gaming them reaches the billions or hundreds of billions in value? What kind of person suddenly wants to become an editor when they get to wear one of the rings of power? (sorry I've been reading LOTR lately) There is a simple calculus here (and everywhere) that shows that as the value of trust grows, so does the value of breaking that trust. Crypto solves this by making the cost of breaking that trust far outside human's capability. It probably would be be asking too much to introduce an element that suddenly makes that cost practically obtainable compared to cracking crypto.
milkey_mouse 4y ago
> As long as AP cryptographically signs the outcome of the game (as they do for all HTTPS served content) I looked into this use case before and came to the conclusion that it can't work because TLS is not non-repudiable. Once the initial public-key handshake is finished, the rest of the session uses a symmetric cipher. Because anyone with the symmetric cipher's key can encrypt their own data with it, you could encrypt your own spoofed response from the server in any transcript of the session. https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29751/are-https-web-sessions-non-repudiable https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29751/are-https-w... One solution to this is to use the site's public key to sign a Web Bundle instead of using TLS: https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses.html https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-... Web bundles can be served from any origin (and I'd imagine can be verified by oracles) as the data itself is signed. However, this requires the server to use web bundles in the first place, which likely isn't happening any time soon. Mozilla considers the proposal harmful: they expect Google will serve the majority of web bundles, allowing them to see what sites the user is visiting. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/264 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/264 https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/30/google-proposed-web-bundles-could-threaten-the-web-as-we-know-it/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/30/google-proposed-web-bundle...
- tomhallett 4y ago
  But even if you look past the technicals, the example of the AP being a trusted source for who won the super bowl has issues. What if the AP announces team a won, but then 2 months later it comes out that team a cheated and the NFL retroactively changes the winner (similar to lance armstrong getting wins taken away, or in some years the tour determined there was no winner because there was so much doping.). Is the expectation that the AP will update their page which says who won? While I will concede the example I give above is an extreme edge case, I would also argue that “who won the super bowl” is also an overly simple example.
  - milkey_mouse 4y ago
    I suppose you'd have to write your resolution as "apnews.com will at some point publish a page with the <title> tag containing '49ers', 'win', 'Super Bowl'" and hope the possibility of some sort of retraction would be priced into the market.

imustbeevil 4y ago

> Finding a trusted bookie, especially one who’s licensed in multiple jurisdictions is really hard. Anywhere that it is legal, it is significantly easier than dealing with any blockchain. What you've stumbled upon is the reality that the only feature cryptocurrencies provide is opaque law enforcement, and that feature has a timer. Why would it be any easier for a blockchain to be licensed in multiple jurisdictions? The only difference is that the blockchains are almost definitely not licensed. I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is, but I feel like a blockchain holding accounts of illegal gambling is a pretty weird thing to want to create immutable records of, unless you're the FBI.

Workaccount2 4y ago

The problem is that it inherently places an ever growing bounty on corrupting those "trusted" sources which are in fact human, not cryptographic. The bounty in crypto is only in cracking whatever chosen cryptography, and this is the very heart of crypto's provably rock solid trust. This bounty is worth trillions, but we known with a (very) high level of certainty that no one can claim it. You would have to have broken cryptography, or developed a sci-fi level computer chip in total secret. How much can you trust a handful of news sources when the bounty for gaming them reaches the billions or hundreds of billions in value? What kind of person suddenly wants to become an editor when they get to wear one of the rings of power? (sorry I've been reading LOTR lately) There is a simple calculus here (and everywhere) that shows that as the value of trust grows, so does the value of breaking that trust. Crypto solves this by making the cost of breaking that trust far outside human's capability. It probably would be be asking too much to introduce an element that suddenly makes that cost practically obtainable compared to cracking crypto.

milkey_mouse 4y ago

> As long as AP cryptographically signs the outcome of the game (as they do for all HTTPS served content) I looked into this use case before and came to the conclusion that it can't work because TLS is not non-repudiable. Once the initial public-key handshake is finished, the rest of the session uses a symmetric cipher. Because anyone with the symmetric cipher's key can encrypt their own data with it, you could encrypt your own spoofed response from the server in any transcript of the session. https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29751/are-https-web-sessions-non-repudiable https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29751/are-https-w... One solution to this is to use the site's public key to sign a Web Bundle instead of using TLS: https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://web.dev/web-bundles/ https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses.html https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin-... Web bundles can be served from any origin (and I'd imagine can be verified by oracles) as the data itself is signed. However, this requires the server to use web bundles in the first place, which likely isn't happening any time soon. Mozilla considers the proposal harmful: they expect Google will serve the majority of web bundles, allowing them to see what sites the user is visiting. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/264 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/264 https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/30/google-proposed-web-bundles-could-threaten-the-web-as-we-know-it/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/30/google-proposed-web-bundle...

tomhallett 4y ago
But even if you look past the technicals, the example of the AP being a trusted source for who won the super bowl has issues. What if the AP announces team a won, but then 2 months later it comes out that team a cheated and the NFL retroactively changes the winner (similar to lance armstrong getting wins taken away, or in some years the tour determined there was no winner because there was so much doping.). Is the expectation that the AP will update their page which says who won? While I will concede the example I give above is an extreme edge case, I would also argue that “who won the super bowl” is also an overly simple example.
- milkey_mouse 4y ago
  I suppose you'd have to write your resolution as "apnews.com will at some point publish a page with the <title> tag containing '49ers', 'win', 'Super Bowl'" and hope the possibility of some sort of retraction would be priced into the market.