2026-07-01
original post mostly written by 2026-06-27
Blockchain distributed oracles for crowdfunded bounties for leaking info
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Contains politically sensitive info
- I have offered (what someone might see as) criticism of Polymarket and UMA optimistic oracle below. I will make clear I have nothing against the founders who run either of these platforms, and I am glad these platforms exist. I have only used them as real world examples to demonstrate more general concepts.
Background context for this idea
- Why I still think bounties for leaking information are powerful
- One of my key (but not original) insights is that the following is a really hard problem - Build a social group that can maintain secrets from rest of society for a long duration, stay completely isolated from rest of society, and ensure its members are psychologically healthy.
- Secrets weigh heavy on people's souls, and especially so if they feel these secrets are immoral to keep. You speak more slowly to avoid divulging the secret, you view the world differently from people outside your group as a result of the information you know and hence can't relate with people outside the group, you feel trapped by the limited number and types of relationships you have with others in your group, and so on. For more on the psychological effects of keeping secrets, see Michael Slepian, or Daniel Ellsberg, or David Brin, or Julian Assange on Conspiracy as Governance, or Viktor Suvorov or any spy biography.
- By default, there are will always be some people in this group who will defect against it and leak the secrets, if they are either offered sufficient money or a sufficiently strong ideological motivation.
- (In my head, "sufficiently strong ideological motivation" translates to "find someone not part of their ingroup who can listen to IFS!parts of them that people inside their ingroup cannot". But yes, this is a very IFS framing, and I am not married to IFS ways of looking at politics and ideology.)
- Why don't there already exist many bounties for leaking info?
- My guess is there haven't been as many such bounties already because all of the following people become targets themselves. This includes the people who will pay for information, the people who will maintain the infrastructure for the payment, the people who will redact information before publishing it, the people who will host the leaked information, the people who protect the leakers after the leak, and so on. If you want to maximise leaking, you want to distribute all these pieces of infra, so no single person can be easily targeted.
- PGP, Tails and Tor have helped distribute the messaging infra.
- Securedrop has helped distribute the hosting part, arguably you can also host content on blockchain itself if needed.
- Many whistleblowers can be successfully protected within their own country, and Snowden has shown the path for those that cannot.
- Maybe an open source AI running on TAILS can automate redaction.
- Inventing ideology to encourage more leaks is needed. Many people across the political spectrum are busy creating ideology online that can help with this. Although more can still help.
- The payment infra (to incentivise leaks) is one key step here that is still not fully distributed.
Blockchain distributed oracles for bounties for leaking info
- See also
- There is a problem of trustworthiness, when promising bounties in return for leaked information. How does the leaker know they will get paid?
- Heads of govts have enough reputation at stake that you can often trust they will pay, if they claim they will pay. However heads of govts often don't want the leaked info to become public, they just want it to be passed on to their intelligence agency. This is why this method of incentivising leaks is not sufficient. I want the info to become public.
- Most random individuals who can pay here, don't have enough reputation or wealth at stake, such that you can be sure they will actually pay even if they claim they will pay. Also most random individuals can't protect themselves against counterattack so easily, so they would prefer pooling their assets into an anonymous cryptocurrency bounty.
- Polymarket can be used to incentivise leaking of info. However, it is run by a bunch of founders in the US physically present in the US, with US VC money. They rely on UMA optimistic oracle, whose founder also is phyically present in the US.
- I am not optimistic you can use UMA optimistic oracles to incentivise leaking of US classified information for example. The UMA founders will probably be pressured to get the oracle to lie about the result. (But also, I haven't studied it properly enough to offer a strong comment.)
- Wikileaks did at one point get millions of dollars in donations, which they then offered as incentive for more leaks. Wikileaks team naturally became targets as a result of their work.
- Assume we hypothetically had a blockchain oracle whose ground truth was provided by a group of people living across all 9 nuclear-armed countries. Then it will be possible to crowdfund a bounty for leaking information, with the people paying the actual money staying fully anonymous. The oracle will be honestly able to payout to only the actual leakers.
- Even if one govt pressured their people to lie to the oracle online, the oracle will still answer truthfully. Only if a majority of all govts all colluded, would they be able to shut down this system.
- I like crowdfunded bounties here more than I like one wealthy individual paying the entire bounty because it is harder to go after thousands of people, than it is to go after the one wealthy individual. Pierre Omidyar previously funded The Intercept for instance, but he is less brazen in his efforts nowadays is my (possibly uninformed) guess.
- Ofcourse this entire system will only work with leaks that have actual conclusive proof that they are not forgeries. You will need actual proof such as signed DKIM headers or video footage that hasn't been tampered or similar. If people suspect the leak is fake, then the oracle can't answer honestly.
- Lastly, I think (but am not sure) it will be a good idea to ensure people who countribute to the bounty can't undo their countribution later on. The bounty will sit eternally on the chain until someone leaks info and wins the payment.
Maybe you can build a prototype
- If you are good at smart contract security, maybe you can build a protoype for this. You need an escrow contract that allows deposits from anyone, but reads its withdrawal address from the UMA OO.
- I will update this writeup if I ever end up building this myself.
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