Hacker News Reader

Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone has a really clever idea but I do not think anything rooted in the real world can work. You will always need some kind of sensor to record whatever it is that you are doing in the real world and you will have to prevent people from faking those sensor readings. If you had a central authority as root of trust you might be able to build some tamper-proof device that provides cryptographically attested values but I can not think of a way to do something like this without already having a root of trust.

View on HN

This is called the oracle problem.

The proposed solutions are in the same vein as security in base layer consensus mechanism: create an economic incentive to be accurate over time. Make sensors/sensor data compete to be designated as roots and gain some sort of revenue. Reputation is hard to build, but easy to destroy.

I think they are similar but not identical problems. For things like some stock price I can see how you could have several competing oracles that can build trust over time, but if you want to monitor and report the amount of solar energy I am producing for mining I can not see how this could work. Especially not if you want to preserve anonymity which kind of rules out that miners crosscheck each other by placing their own sensors.

Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank pushes for a sustainable Bitcoin. His proposed solution is to have basically "certified" Miners mine clean Coins and never exchange them. Of course if this takes over Bitcoin isn't really decentralized anymore, but he thinks Institutional Investors would prefer that.

If you are willing to do that, then make them certified ledger maintainers and throw out the entire mining overhead and make them use a good old SQL database. Sprinkle as much cryptography on top of that as you want to feel happy about unforgeability and such. The only reason to have a mining process is to allow anonymity, when you give up on that, mining becomes pointless. Also Bitcoin has not been decentralized for a long time, the idea that every Bitcoin user gets a vote in the consensus process went out the window a decade ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com