> the parent comment is ignorant of how decentralized oracles work
I probably am. But I get pitched a project that involves one about every day. Multiple oracles, staking...they solve a fake problem--counting votes--while leaving the real problem--who the oracle(s) is/are and how they make their decision--untouched.
If you're measuring something objective, like a stock price or weather report, fine. Whatever. But a bespoke, subjective output? Requiring specialists to be done correctly? Like a decision on whether an insurance pay-out is warranted in a specific case?
We could create arbitration with extra steps, which is what ChainLink and friends are doing. But again, you've replaced a centralized actor governed by law and reputation with a centralized set governed by reputation alone. (Staking doesn't solve this problem; it just dilutes and punts it.) And if you're pulling from a predictable pool of specialists, you can bet your ass they'll be lobbied.
> Multiple oracles, staking...they solve a fake problem--counting votes--while leaving the real problem--who the oracle(s) is/are and how they make their decision--untouched.
The point is really to not to have an oracle. To be clear, I think this is still an open research problem in crypto, but I expect the solution to be a combination of making it very expensive to lie and to make the rewards that can be obtained through lying worthless. (I won't discuss specific projects here.)
Ofc there are no guarantees that we'll have a solution, but I'm also not aware of any theoretical limitations. The rewards are enormous which drives a lot of experimentation in the space, and hey, who would've thought that we could solve the double spending problem 15 years ago?
> making it very expensive to lie and to make the rewards that can be obtained through lying worthless
Lying is a small, small subset of commercial disputes. When a party loses in front of the Supreme Court, it isn’t because someone lied. It’s because they interpreted the facts differently. Solving for lying could be helpful, but it largely returns us to square one.
> who would've thought that we could solve the double spending problem 15 years ago?
Admire the enthusiasm. But note that the Byzantine general’s problem was solved well before Bitcoin.
