I believe the block size limit issue is getting critical. You guys should check out Reggie Middleton's Veritaseum. Quoting:
I still don't understand how the tickers are fed into veritaseum to settle the bets. Can you explain that?
Our server acts as an Oracle feeding commodity ticker data (think Reuters, Google, Bloomberg) into the wallets to adjudicate P&L.
There is research available on how to create a more decentralized, consensus driven oracle. Apologies I will not google now for a citation.
Edit: perhaps it was on Ethereum's blog that I saw some mention of research.