Bitcoin Forum

In this article, we cover different approaches for Blockchain Governance & Dispute Resolution, a topic that is getting more and more relevant as we are on the road for Blockchain Adaption. Oath Protocol evolves to become the standard in this field. Not only do we propose a decentralized and transparent authority to resolve disputes (bring back the middleman) but also connect Communities and thus actively contribute to accelerate blockchain mass adaption.

Check it out and leave us a comment.

https://medium.com/oathprotocol/the-lay-of-the-land-in-blockchain-dispute-resolution-and-governance-designs-9b97b0e469b8

In my opinion this could give us, both users and investors, some advantage in terms of avoiding some of the risk when doing transactions. Buying coins is facilitated easily through them but at the expense of adding some to the cost of transactions. But if giving a little to them is worth more than the risk of doing transactions directly maybe it is far more better this way. In my locality we trusted the middle man to do transactions although it cost us a lot but I think it is better than losing your money through unknown or a faraway exchange that may just be another scam.

I don't think this will ever work on bitcoin. This proposal is only applicable to a government or a small group of people wanting to have some leader-figure in their community. Bitcoin has been okay without any central figure of authority for the past 9 years, and lots of genuine and clever ideas have sprouted due to the decentralized nature of the network. If we were to have someone as a liaison, wouldn't that give this central figure some sort of hunger for power over time? We've already witnessed how grim it could be with our present governments, and have we learned not a single lesson from that?

What is decentralized in this thing?
As long as they are nominated by somebody the whole decentralization is gone.


As for all of them, I love the fact that you have to pay (and in some cases a lot) to open an arbitration...
So basically, the one that can't afford it cause all his money is gone can say goodbye to justice and the one that has thousands of coins(tokens) and wallets at his disposal can stay pretty calm as he has a good chance that he will be the one ruling the dispute.

Two minutes spent on 4chain and then imagining of those guys posting there deciding in matters that can influence in a serious way someone's finances or life is one scary future!!!!!

I have think of the activities of middleman been introduced into cryptocurrencies as the level of scamming we are having now will be drastically reduced.  Outside scamming and fraudulent activity I think cryptocurrencies should remain decentralized but because of the ways people are lossing money daily on icos that is the reason why i am saying this.  Without the help of middleman it will take a very long time before bitcoin can witness big adoptions either by governments or institutional investors.

The idea of arbitrators is what blockchain was trying to avoid. They require additional costs, time and risks. Even if one is trained, how do we make sure s_he is not motivated by a bribe that was received from one party? Smart contracts are trying to be pretty good at avoiding intermediaries but of course not everything can be solved by them. 6 eos unrefundable fee just to get the case arbitraged - that's almost nothing, but the fee grows tremendously if the disputed some is big. And there are also final arbitration costs, which is another ton of money! It's good that Oath is different in this matter, and this project sure might be an improvement in that sphere and there will probably always be people who are into suing each other to resolve matters.

A middleman eradicates any issues with safety. A middleman can testify if something was wrong and needs to be verified. This is very hard to be implemented in a decentralized space.

Bringing any form of middle man in a decentralized network defeats the purpose. Bitcoin's main feature is its decentralization and if its gone then the coin will not thrive.

As soon as an authority is nominated to resolve disputes, the whole of decentralization is gone. This is just directly opposite of the fundamental essence of bitcoin.

Isn't this contradictory to the ideas of crypto? The technology was always meant to be decentralized and when this person is nominated, the whole feature is destroyed.

Our Approach is not to replace decision making on whether or not to hard fork a chain or replace the BIP Forum. We merely focus on low value high volume disputes on the back end. Meaning: If a smart contract cannot be executed due to unforeseen influences that occurred during the exchange between the two parties involved, there is a necessity of an arbitrator to resolve this dispute - which cannot be covered by code.

To 1) the entire decision making is decentralized. You do not need to get nominated by anyone. Anyone can sign up and fills our a form where he provides basic information and absolves a simulation/test (some sort of KYC to initially filter out bots and malicious actors, if you will). Other, more experienced, Jurors will evaluate this test (but they cannot refuse him to join) and suggest an initial credit level for the newly recruited juror. This is all totally run and managed by the Community - so basically anyone who wants can join without restrictions.

To 2) EOS charges a case submission fee of minimum 6 EOS, so correctly said, if you submit a case and it gets refused by ECAF (centralized) you still have to pay. On Oath, arbitration fees are totally managed by the disputants without minimum fees involved. If they offer 0 rewards for the Jurors to resolve their conflict, they can do so. Without monetary incentive, however, it might be hard to continuously get disputes resolved.

Good points! I entirely agree that getting rid of the Middlemen is actually the entire point of decentralization and p2p networks. However, as you also said correctly, 1) smarts cannot cover each scenario and 2) we believe that "decentralization" without authorities/decision makers will lead to anarchy. That's even more dangerous than having centralization. So the ultimate conclusion is to simply decentralize the decision making as a complementary to only get active if it comes to a dispute, controversial opinions or content, or the like.

Our suggestion is merely an improvement for Blockchain Security besides the technological aspects. Hope that makes sense :)

Have you checked our articles? We aim to decentralize the "Middlemen" and only apply it when it comes to disputes. There is a massive need of a reliable and sustainable arbitration mechanism. One thing is sure: We will never get rid of disputes :)

Totally legit. However, arbitration is always being needed as thousands or even hundreds of thousands disputes arise daily. Think of e commerce, rentals, home sharing, content sharing, .... that's what we aim to resolve through a decentralized and unbiased community with a fee model based on the free-market principle :)

I understand the intention behind this, however, I don't see how any community can be totally unbiased. It is simply impossible, and a fee based model would easily be corrupted.

The blockchain is the only middleman that matters in crypto, why would the community need another one? Scams are the more reason why folks should be careful how and to whom the spend their coins. Anything centralized can be manipulated to benefit whoever is running it. A bad idea if you ask me.

Why would be the use of that middle man if you already want it to be decentralized. That is the most important tool of being decentralize you only have to deal with 1 person.

We do not propose "another" middleman for the Community, rather to turn the Community itself into the middleman. By definition, a middleman is merely acting as a bridge, initially without bad intentions. It is the Framework which is merely based on trust coupled with human nature (greed, power, envy) who over time turned the Middleman into a figure we want to get rid of. It is now a completely new Era not only from Technology side but also do we re-invent contract conclusion, social and economic interactions, trust-issues and more. Through the Blockchain Innovation, we basically reprogram the human Mindset to this modern world.
Part of it also being a decentralized middleman, or in other words, a decentralized decision maker.

What we do with Oath is providing the new framework, adapted into the modern society & economy with a fair & transparent system, tailored to the Blockchain Sphere and in the ideology of Decentralization and anti-corruption/-bribery.

Right, the main point of Blockchain Technology is replacing the Middlemen through cryptographic secure algorithms, right? However, Technology is always limited by itself and lacks of human rationality, emotions and morals (maybe achievable one day through AI). In fact, there are no such peer-to-peer systems through Blockchain Technology but peer-to-nodes-to-peer. Trust has not been replaced, just distributed through technological Networks that we trust because its transparent, unhackable and immutable.

Bitcoin was created to cut out the middleman and eliminate the need for trust.
Yes there are hacks and scams happening and decent people are being affected but that is the cost of having a decentralised and open currency we have and enjoy.
I can see the point of the article and it is possible that some form of arbritige could be formed,
What kind of power would they have though?

Valid Point! However, it is also important to point out that trust is not being eliminated, it is just reduced. We still need to trust the system, the coder, the contracts and the technology - all of them being created by human beings. The Power, if you will, is that they can give a judgement based on the evidence provided by the Disputants. It is not preserved for any PoS-like algorithms who would give more weight to your voice if you stake more tokens or are more experienced.
Our solution suggests an incentive (besides the monetary rewards for ruling cases) as in the more experienced you are (meaning the more cases you have successfully helped to resolve), the more meaningful and important contributions can be accomplished: such as evaluating new jurors' initial credit score.

No Juror will have the power to solely decide on cases or reject / kick out other Jurors.

with the decentralization system in the blockchain, it makes it safer, and avoids fraud, because we send it directly to the opponent of the transaction without any less effective intermediaries

Middleman but decentralized is the decentralized marketplaces we have right now. Basically places like decentralized exchanges and decentralized shop places in the crypto world is trying to achieve exactly this. There are even games where the game mechanics are working towards decentralized game play so you can literally play with each other without any developer making anything better for anyone and unfair for others.

I think middleman is a such huge business that it won't be easy for crypto to cover all that market share in a jiff but it will be there slowly. When people realize they can use a middleman and have trusted platform to either buy or sell something without actually paying for a middleman all free than they will start to move and eventually there will be small problems but the trust will be build over time.

I don't know. I mean placong a middle man through all this just makes decentralization pointless. If the problen is conflict resolution then I'd guess we can have a sort of judiciary system , which is supposedly the SEC. This entity shouldn't have a hand over crypto currency at all. It just makes them unbiased and all that.

Conflicts are unavoidable, especially in a p2p, decentralized world. Think of e commerce, rentals, trading, lending, content sharing, ...
Having the SEC resolving those issues would 1) lead back to centralization and 2) be impossible due to the amount of disputes that occur daily (eventually hundreds of thousands or millions of conflicts arise currently in our society/economy).

With Oath Protocol, we propose a decentralized decision maker, the Community, composed of general users. We start recruiting Jurors very soon. To become a Juror, you do not need specific expertise and can start arbitrating right away on our partnering platforms that include NEM, Qtum, MOAC, Populstay, UNetwork and many more :)

Feel free to check out our concept, which is based on the common law jury system:
http://www.chinacryptonews.com/sponsored-article/oath-protocol-the-conflict-resolution-system-for-the-future/

I believe SEC is not a kind of judiciary system but it is kind of regulatory authority for investors and investment-instruments and its providers. Definitely SEC will not handle basic transactions related disputes. I agree with you that a middleman entity should not have any influence into crypto space. Yes, a middleman authority must have limited power like controlling to only the transaction related things not into the entire system.

We always must need some judiciary system and dispute governing system so that the transaction related disputes will find its solution. When no one will be controlling both the parties(buyer and seller) then the chances of scams will be highly and also no one will be ready to initiate the transaction progress at first.

We propose a "decentralized middleman". In fact, smart contracts are also sort of middlemen, but written in code and note driven by human emotions. However, the code is always restricted by itself, we therefore require a complementary third party composed of general users (in the best case scenario) who would jump in and decide what to do.

If you mean middleman in terms of escrow, it have already proved that the need of escrow is most important for any ecosystem not just decentralized one. Because, we cannot predict when a dispute will rise and who will manage that to find a solution. A governing is always good but it should be up to some limit like it should not interfere into the core concepts of decentralization.

I understand this is nothing new from what we are already having in this forum in the names of escrow. Yes, when buyer and seller want to protect themselves then they must be needing an escrow to be engaged for their business. I believe this will not affect in any level into decentralized system. But, if it will control the decentralized system then we should not go for it by any means. I mean to say being with decentralized system is more important than having such a system.

Yes, you are sending directly to the opponent but what will be the guarantee for that opponent will be sending you exactly for what you are paying. For example in a case of not at all sending or sending lesser in quantity or in quality then how you will handle that situation and how you will avoid such a fraud ?

For this the governance of controlling both you and your opponent is must. This is what OP is explaining.

Decentralized doesn't really mean that it can't be regulated or it can't be touched by the law, people who are scamming others in crypto world also get punishment too, there are multiple cases involving some ICO owners that get punishments from the law because they have taken peoples money illegally and not give people back what they promised in return.

Decentralized only means the code of it can't be touched. Just to give an example if I steal 10 bitcoin from someone that's still stealing and I will go to jail, however I can't make bitcoin to have 22 million bitcoins as a cap, it is a hard 21 million and won't change. So you see middleman is a good idea that we can all agree would be nice but making it decentralized won't be easy as the code of it can't be touched and regulations would still apply.

We are also developing a escrow system which will be governing both electronic and physical goods transactions worldwide. We are in plan to engage providing mandatory proof by videos. It means when the sender will be sending out the goods he needs to take video while parceling and also when the receiver opening the person he also must take video for physical goods. For electronic goods, we will handle how escrows are doing in this forum.

Decentralized cryptocurrency mean we eliminating third party or middleman like banks for our transaction. Its peer to peer transaction and if middleman used again, i think it will become centralized cryptocurrency.

If it is so decentralized then why we should still need those middle man if we can directly send anything from person to another person?