Quote from: gmaxwell on February 06, 2015, 06:44:35 PM

As a general bit of advice, people tend to throw writeups in the trash when they begin with a number of strongly worded incorrect comparative claims.

The most visible (and seemingly most widely used) approach to binary external information contracts in Bitcoin is the reality keys approach: This has the oracles selectively reveal a private key based on an outcome. This is consistent ('reality based') and one can happily use multiple oracles in your thresholds, which meets your (IMO misleading) definition of trustless. The contracts are also tradable with the cooperation of all the parties (but not the oracles), which is indeed an area that could be improved. The key reveal approach also has other useful properties, like being private (used well, no one who isn't a party to the contract-- even the oracle-- can tell a contract happened).

In future writeups you should limit your comparison to a very specific implementation to avoid turning people off with "wtf, thats not right"; or better: focus on describing the positive qualities of your proposal rather than criticizing other things.

On a more technical note, ... are you really putting a URL fetch into a consensus rule in the system, what happens when a malicious site gives random results? WRT "trust" at least in Bitcoin the trust in miners is generally narrower than you think, and the consequences of violating that trust are more limited. (Also keep in mind you're still single threading your trust on that URL).

Cheers,

On Bitcoin it is most certainly true you can have a multisig script with many signatures. The main issues/improvements to this approach are:
1) The script itself is not liquid and tradable in the same way as Bitcoin currency is liquid and tradable. By having a contract tradable as a currency it eliminates any friction and barriers to trading the value or liability of a contract. Currently, there is no way to trade all or part of a multisig script without cooperation from the other parties in the contract.
2) My use of the term "reality based" is a reference to the fact that each multisig script on Bitcoin is independent from any other script on the blockchain. There is no link between what should be two identical contracts, and so two identical contracts can potentially be scored differently if the oracle(s) mistakenly or purposefully decide to. When implemented the way I described, all contracts using the same data sources would be scored by the data instead of by oracles. It is true something has to gather that data, but the data itself scores the contract not the private key signatures.