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Comment by space_rock | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain is overhypered nonsense 99.9999% of the time. But seriously this is the one in a billion projects where you should use the Bitcoin blockchain as much as I hate to say it

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Indeed, there was a service I used back in around 2008 that did just this. It wasn't about predictions per se, but timestamping content. They were called GuardTime. The company still exists, but the service does not seem to, anymore.

It wasn't based on a public, distributed block chain, but it was a kind of a block chain (without PoW, PoS etc. - which you don't need if it's run by a single actor). The way they built trust was that they did publish their hash (tip of the block chain) I think in the (printed) Financial Times periodically. That made it impossible even for them to forge the chain.

It could commit the hashes via https://opentimestamps.org/ to the bitcoin blockchain for example.

Yes. Nice link. This is the project that I had in mind

There is (was?) a relatively popular Ethereum one isn't (wasn't) there?

Adding in the 'contracts' nature of it to commit to a wager on the prediction.

What feature would a blockchain give them that they can't have now in a simpler way?

A proof that the pok and its hash hasn't been altered since its creation.

You can accomplish this with plain old cryptography. No blockchain needed.

There are lots of ways to do it. One of them would be for Fuuture to publish the hash to literally anywhere.

Public + cryptographically verifiable + distributed + append-only still does not equal blockchain, as long as we're defining blockchain as something that was not invented before 2009.

So these hashes are distributed. How do we know they haven't been altered since future reveal? How does one find the "true" dataset? Trust random people on the internet?

no, since it's public, if you care so much about it, you keep a periodic snapshot of the hashes. So you're trusting yourself (and math). What's missing to be a "blockchain" in (what should be) the generally accepted definition is byzantine fault tolerance.

Right so save some time and put the hashes in a Merkel tree and publish on the Bitcoin blockchain. Now the proof can be found trustlessly and the longest PoW points to the true dataset

Once you're done building a working system to do the above, you'd have basically built a blockchain.

Using a very loose definition of blockchain, sure. For anything post-Satoshi, no.

The extra governance layer that makes it a blockchain is also not trivial.

It's a tamper-proof prediction to the world that cannot be altered by any party

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