2026-08-03
To maximise censorship-resistance, blockchain oracles should vote on a few broad questions, not many specific questions
Disclaimer
Main
- In the previous post, I looked into why ethereum smart contracts cannot trustlessly verify the authenticity of emails or web content. You are still reliant on the N/2-of-N assumption like all oracles.
- Even though such methods are not able to weaken the N/2-of-N trust assumption, I still have a bit of hope left in these sorts of methods for an entirely different reason, namely censorship-resistance.
- Cryptocurrency payments are currently used for all sorts of morally questionable use cases. For example, paying for child porn, funding terrorist groups, purchasing drugs, paying hacker ransoms, evading taxes and so on.
- However, society has not still not shut down cryptocurrencies completely. A major reason for this is that there are also people with relatively less morally questionable use cases also using the same system, who also rely on the same censorship-resistance. For instance, people who want to escape capital controls, people who want to escape devaluation of their currency, people who want to escape financial surveillance by their govt, and so on. It is not possible in a censorship-resistant cryptocurrency for only certain use cases to be banned and others to be allowed, you have to ban all or allow all.
- Similarly, blockchain oracles have both more and less morally questionable use cases.
- A system to trustlessly pay for information being leaked could again be used to leak everything from classified information to people's nudes to child porn to recipes to manufacture weapons and so on.
- I would ideally like to build a censorship-resistant oracle that will honestly respond to all requests, not one that can pick and choose which requests it will respond honestly to and which ones it will refuse to respond (or lie) to.
- As of today, when relying on a proof-of-stake-style DAO to vote on oracle requests (like UMA optimistic oracle), voters do have the ability to vote honestly on some requests but not on others.
- However, suppose you were not voting on specific things like "did this leak from OpenBrain happen or not?" but broad things like "is this the public key for the internet root CA?" or "is this the DKIM signing key for reuters.com?". And suppose there were both more legit and less legit use cases all relying on the same requests to the oracle. Then it becomes a lot harder for the oracle to honestly respond to some requests and lie to others.
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