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2026-08-28

Wikipedia publishes free public archives. Reuters and Associated Press do not.

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  • Signed web crawls might help solve the oracle problem
  • What is the bottleneck for ZK proof systems for ethereum smart contracts for frontier AI models?
  • To maximise censorship-resistance, blockchain oracles should vote on a few broad questions not many specific questions
• I am researching censorship-resistant blockchain oracles. By censorship-resistant, I mean they cannot selectively answer some queries but not others.
• Oracles need to retrieve some data, and sometimes do some computation on it. I was looking into data sources for such a censorship-resistant blockchain oracle.
• Wikipedia publishes monthly archives, free and public, along with SHA256 hashes. Suppose an oracle (such as a 51% majority of proof-of-stake DAO on ethereum) publishes the merkle root of wikipedia archive once a month. Now any user can prove to a smart contract the authenticity of any specific wikipedia page in this archive.
• Just like Wikipedia, Reuters and Associated Press are trusted by mainstream to prove fact-checked accurate information about a lot of events, including politically sensitive ones.
• However, Reuters and Associated Press do not publish free public archives. This means you need to crawl them yourself, and establish public consensus on which crawl is accurate (if multiple people crawl), in order to obtain a merkle root everyone agrees to. This is a slightly more messy problem.

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