2026-07-01
Brainstorming notes - blockchain distributed oracle for crowdfunded bounties for leaking info
Disclaimer
- Thinking aloud, may not endorse after lot of thought.
- By default, don't assume anything here is safe to use irl yet.
Main
- UMA
- Study emergency capabilities of UMA optimistic oracle, for instance here. Are the contracts actually immutable or is there a founder veto? Also what is the country-wise distribution of voting UMA tokens?
- drug markets
- This is again the drug market escrow problem all over again, assuming the people behind the oracle stay anonymous.
- If they are not anonymous, they become targets, and maybe not that many people are willing to volunteer for such a role. (That is fine though? It is unpopular yes, but you also don't need that many people.)
- The most common solutions are to trust one reputed person, or trust a multisig of reputed people, or trust a proof-of-stake governance token (either a native chain token like ETH stake or whatever, or a token just for this like UMA).
- Maybe I should just do the dumb thing here and go hunt for people on twitter who wanna be part of such a multisig? Like, the v0.1 dumb version is to just use a multisig to store the funds, don't even need to write any contracts of your own.
- incentive for oracle providers
- Maybe the people operating the oracle should get a cut of the funds, as payment for services rendered? Just like how dark web drug markets take a cut. Worth exploring.
- comingle with a more popular use case
- very important - most blockchain / cypherpunk ideas so far have only taken off by comingling a more popular use case with a less popular use case. Tor enabled Securedrop for journalists, versus silk road for drugs. Polymarket enabled election betting, and also insider trading. USDC enabled evading capital control, and evading taxes.
- It will help a lot if there is some more popular use case for which you also need oracle data like "was there a leak about OpenBrain or not? which ETH address leaked it?" For instance, what if some oracle just dumps the entire reuters news headlines on the blockchain? And what if there is some more popular use case that also relies on this same data?
2026-07-02
More ideas
- Ethereum smart contracts can verify email DKIM headers
- If the document is signed, then you can trustlessly (within ethereum's security model) verify that the leaked document is from an official domain such as openbrain.com or similar. I just can't yet think of a way to trustlessly verify that the document is of a certain type, such as say financial fraud or rape or whatever. (Most documents are not that interesting to leak, nor does a leak of an official document by itself also prove other more interesting documents were leaked.)
- Measure popularity?
- Is there a way for the blockchain to trustlessly measure whether a document has a lot of eyeballs on it, even if it can't verify what is on the document? Probably not, right, you will again need an oracle for this.
- Oracles for lawsuits?
- If a lawsuit is opened against the person who leaked the document, this can also count as proof. Is there a way for a blockchain to verify this happened without using an oracle? What if an oracle just published titles of all lawsuits to blockchain, and there was also a legitimate use case comingled? (like what lmao, what lawsuits are "legitimate" to gamble on?)
- Proportional PoS voting?
- What if the people who donated the money were themselves also the voters (one token, one vote), and also the voting was proportional? So if 80% votes against and 20% votes for, then 20% of the total fund gets donated? This ensures some funds get donated even in the case of a 51% attack.
- Worth analysing all the ways this sort of scheme can be attacked
- lol is this just reinventing quadratic funding? I should read about resistance of QF and QF-like schemes to 51% malicious votes
Note to self
- Part of me is saying this is really important, anonymous crowdsourced funding is the number bottleneck for more leaks. But part of me is also saying this is a nerd snipe, to spend time thinking about some QF MACI private voting contraption, full vitalik-style. I should instead first implement the dumb solution which is to cold DM people on twitter and ask them to join a multisig. This makes more contact with actual reality.
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