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Comment by zippoxer | Hacker News Reader

> examples that wouldn't be better served by a database are basically non-existent.

If you say so, then here's a question for you.

Using only non-blockchain databases, can you build an exchange that is..

  1) Owned by no one, or owned by a community to which anyone can join.

  2) Unstoppable. Can't be shutdown even if you cold murder the entire team.

  3) Can't be regulated (will never do KYC/AML).

  4) Permission-less: anyone can trade and/or provide the liquidity.

  5) Open-source with indisputable proof that it *always* runs *exactly* and *only* the code it shows on GitHub.

In other words, can you build Uniswap [1] with MySQL?

[1] https://app.uniswap.org

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What's the real world problem that this solves, and is it actually solving that problem for anyone today or is it hypothetical?

24/7 global market with exposure to almost every asset class including new ones with billions of notional USD in liquidity and where people actually are, is that not good enough?

I’m specifically referring to non-custodial decentralized exchanges and automated market maker systems like Uniswap, trading tokenized versions of things.

Every asset class is 99% speculation, including national currencies. Weird when people look at crypto by this other fictional higher standard that no other asset class would achieve while dismissing speculation as a lesser non-use case, not saying you did but predicting someone else was about to.

If you use tokenized versions of things, don't most of the 5 benefits listed previously break down?

If you have an entity selling some tokens representing GOOG on some blockchain, then this entity can (will) be regulated, is a central point of failure, and so on. This problem of interfacing a blockchain with the real world seems like a common theme that's swept under the rug, and I've never seen a convincing answer. What am I missing?

oracles. people are using APIs to get pricing data of real world access, and create entire nodes of networks that have to agree, in the blockchain space they call these oracles. for tokenized assets this just makes them synthetics, indeed one of the biggest services you can use for creating and trading synthetics is called "Synthetix"

a centralized asset backed model is only one possibility and that does have the central point of failure.

it is extremely lucrative to build these API and API networks right now as an 'oracle provider', and decently lucrative to be a highly available oracle.

In the crypto space, both the oracle provider is tokenized with the tokens being typically used to get access to the API network (friction is reduced in some models by only charging/bonding the nodes that want to join the network, instead of consumers) ie $LINK, $BAND, $TRB, $DIA, and the derivatives provider would be tokenized as well ie. $SNX, alongside all the tokens you want to create and trade, or just trade

I guess it's not using just one oracle, otherwise you still have a single point of failure, right? So N oracles are used? What happens if 1 out of N is malicious? k out of N?

How do you check that the N oracles are not actually run by the same person behind the scenes? How do you make sure that it's not economically profitable for an entity to run these N oracles and send bogus data, even if only once?

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