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.
Veritaseum is not a research project, it's a for profit business. We have developed ways to decentralize, or even fully distribute the oracle but that did not improve the product. We (and presumably you as well) don't want to decentralize things for the sake of just decentralizing it. Decentralization is done to improve the outcomes. If the outcome is not improved, then the decision to decentralize is simply not made (at least in our camp). Once it comes to custody of the assets, we went way beyond decentralization and fully distributed the network. Why? Because it makes for a better outcome. The same can't be said for everything, though.