 A friend of mine fell into the pond while we were fishing, but I didn't let him off the hook |
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The second and final part of a new big article about Blockchain Oracles published on stealthex.io. The first episode and prequel to this series about DeFi can be found here and here. Your feedback is welcome and appreciated!
Blockchain Oracles: Connecting the Worlds - Part IIIn the first part of this article we offered a thorough introduction on blockchain oracles and why they are vital to the decentralised space, along with several examples in the Decentralized Finance domain. However, DeFi is not the only fish in the sea, and there are other noteworthy use cases of blockchain oracles in the crypto space not associated with DeFi. This second and final part is dedicated to the application of blockchain oracles in other areas, and concludes with the challenges the technology faces and the techniques used to overcome them. Oracles for prediction marketsPrediction markets are another area where the idea of blockchain oracles fits like a glove. Sometimes, they are also referred to as betting markets, but regardless of the naming convention, their concept revolves around wagering on the outcome of a real-life event. In these markets anyone can create and trade event outcomes, and since the outcomes require independent verification, there’s a job for a blockchain oracle as well to do the task in the most efficient and reliable manner. As with DeFI, a few prominent players inhabit this space, and number one on the list is Augur. It made a name for itself during the 2016 US presidential elections when it had reportedly attracted over $2 million of bets on the election outcome. The oracle of Augur is based on a trustless consensus of users who hold the platform’s native Reputation token. If they fail to deliver honest and accurate reports of outcomes, a split in the token may follow rendering their forked version of Reputation worthless as no one will sign up to their prediction markets in the future for false reporting. In this way, reporters are financially encouraged to provide accurate information on the outcomes of real-world occurrences. A different approach to an oracle solution is employed by Gnosis, a decentralized prediction market platform, which came into the spotlight in 2017. With Gnosis, anyone can offer oracle services. Users creating a prediction market can select any oracle or a group of oracles for the event resolution. But that’s not all. If the market participants disagree with the resolution, they can challenge it by applying to the so-called Ultimate Oracle. Then, a new market is created to resolve the dispute by allowing anyone to decide on the outcome within 24 hours. The winners are rewarded, the losers are punished, and the outcome is used for the resolution of the primary market. Augur and Gnosis were the first prediction markets platforms allowing users to forecast future events and bet on them. With Omen, an information market platform, users can specify the data source of their own choice to be used as an oracle, supplemented by an online dispute resolution platform Kleros as the final arbitrator. With Delphy, a social mobile prediction market platform, the winning outcome is determined by the so-called Oracle of the Event, for example, the NBA official website for the prediction of an NBA game, combined with a dispute arbitration mechanism in case such a dispute should arise. Oracles for other domainsDeFi and prediction markets are the most notable use cases of blockchain oracles, and for due reasons. However, oracles also made inroads into other fields as diverse as supply chain tracking for querying geolocation data, lottery smart contracts for random number generation, insurance contracts for damage verification, flight statistics for ticket pooling, weather forecasts for calculating insurance premiums, and even retrieval of information about events on other blockchains. Below we describe a couple of such platforms that may be worth looking into from the oracle point of view. So our next entry on the list of platforms that feature blockchain oracles is FOAM, a platform which provides an alternative to GPS geolocation for an array of industries such as Internet of Things, supply chains, airlines, electrical grids, autonomous cars, mobile operators, or any other industry that relies on GPS. As before, we are interested in the platform’s approach toward implementing a data verification layer. FOAM is intriguing because it offers a hardware-based oracle solution. Basically, its Proof of Location protocol works similarly to GPS, but in a decentralized and fault-tolerant way through a user-run network of hardware radio beacons connecting to each other and synchronizing their clocks. This enables them to compute the distance between nodes and report fraud-proof location data. We conclude our exemplary list of platforms that cannot live without an oracle with a decentralized insurance platform, Nexus Mutual, which aims at “bringing the mutual ethos of a community-based model back to insurance” by “creating aligned incentives through smart contract code on the Ethereum blockchain”. What interests us here, though, is not the art of high rhetoric and catchy slogans but the approach to damage verification. Given that there is a strong incentive to defraud the insurance pool, Nexus comes up with a consensus model of claim verification and requires claims assessors to have a stake in the form of membership tokens that would discourage them to act dishonestly. Otherwise, they are to suffer financially and have their member tokens burned without redemption. The Oracle ProblemSmart contracts are poised to transform the ways that we humans interact in our business endeavors. To make our lives easier, blockchain oracles strive to close the gap between the isolated, pristine execution environment of a smart contract and the real world out there, full of chaos and madness. The large number of implementations making use of distinctively different concepts proves that there is no one-size-fits-all oracle solution. And this leads us to the infamous oracle problem. The Oracle Problem refers to the innate adversarial and random nature of the external world and the formal logic of smart contract execution. Oracles necessarily lie outside the security mechanisms that a smart contract-enabled blockchain provides, and the conflict that arises is the essence of the Oracle Problem, that of the difficulty of fetching credible data from intrinsically unreliable sources, with malicious actors always on the lookout to modify and falsify the data for their financial gain. Different approaches have been tried to solve this issue, for example, by using cryptographic attestations or putting one’s reputation on the line. However, as both theory and practice confirm, economic incentivization works best here. As more and more platforms shift to decentralized oracles, there is solid evidence that creating an incentive to report honestly along with a disincentive to prevent fraudulent broadcasting seems to be an effective way to encourage serious and thorough fact-checking in a consensus-based environment. |
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And while we are at it, can anyone explain to me what is driving the people who are borrowing coins this way? I've been trying to come up with a single reason what's in it for the borrowers, and still can't wrap my head around it. If you have to provide 200% of collateral, how does all that make sense?
Seriously, what's the point?
Well that's some sort of stop-loss. You invest in small cap high risk coin (via dex because not traded on big exchanges) with 1000$ and borrow 500$ eth using your coin as collateral. Now if price drop 90% due to exit scam or something like that you will not loose more than 50% that you have in ETH (or dumped to USDT) already I'm not sure if it is going to work out in practice Indeed, if the "small cap high risk coin" (as you euphemistically called it) bites the dust in the blink of an eye, it might work out. But who is going to pay for it and why would they agree to be part of this game in the first place? On the other hand, why would you want to offer a coin for collateral which is as stable as the borrowed one, and two coins for one at that? To me, it makes no financial sense However, it is almost a given that the collateral will crash way harder than the asset borrowed when the market starts to slide downhill. Realistically, it is only a matter of time till we see blood in the market. It essentially means that once the borrowers start to default en masse, no matter how overcollateralized the system was at first, it won’t suffice as no collateral will be worth anything at 0. The system enters the dreaded death spiral and eventually expires
Interesting point. Looks like we have another brick to the domino. Another because same thing we have with stop-losses, margin trading, leveraged tokens, derivatives with leverage. One trigger another This is the whole story The system looks sustainable only as long as the market keeps rising. But trees don't grow to the sky, and the higher it goes, the lower it will crash or be made to crash (in relative terms). Do people seriously believe that Bitcoin, as the big brother of all cryptocurrencies, is going to hit 25k (100k as some predict) by the end of the year? |
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And while we are at it, can anyone explain to me what is driving the people who are borrowing coins this way? I've been trying to come up with a single reason what's in it for the borrowers, and still can't wrap my head around it. If you have to provide 200% of collateral, how does all that make sense?
Seriously, what's the point?
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My piece crossposted from Reddit
If you’ve been following the DeFI space closely, you should already know that Aave, a decentralized non-custodial money market protocol as it is called in crypto parlance, has been hitting new records by the amounts of money locked in its dApps, with over $1.53 billion of collateral provided as of this post. In more mundane terms, it is a lending platform that allows one group of people to deposit their coins to earn a passive income off another group of people who are borrowing these coins from them by offering some form of collateral The Dark Side of Crypto LendingThe sad truth about any such system is that the scheme is sustainable only in pretty narrow margins. To better see why it is so, let’s take a look at how it might fold, or, in other words, what would make it collapse. The answer is obvious, and it is the failure of the asset used as collateral. For example, if you borrow Ether and provide some token as a pledge, it is unlikely that your token will on average outperform the premier cryptocurrency you take on loan However, it is almost a given that the collateral will crash way harder than the asset borrowed when the market starts to slide downhill. Realistically, it is only a matter of time till we see blood in the market. It essentially means that once the borrowers start to default en masse, no matter how overcollateralized the system was at first, it won’t suffice as no collateral will be worth anything at 0. The system enters the dreaded death spiral and eventually expires Isn’t It All Just Fear Mongering?In fact, we had already seen something to that effect before, in 2008 to be exact, with the subprime mortgage crisis in America. But it is a difference that makes the difference. In 2008 we had a central authority in the form of the government as represented by the Federal Reserve, which had to step in to avoid the domino effect. There’s no one who is going to bail out Aave and prevent the system from imploding this time once everything starts to fall apart There are two possible developments that could potentially stop this dark scenario from unfolding. First, the whole cryptomarket is not set to plunge into the abyss of low prices, and the assets provided by the borrowers don’t have to devalue beyond the point of no return. Then, as long as the collateral itself is not made up of useless tokens, the system may still remain sufficiently collateralized to withstand sudden price drops in major cryptocurrencies Long story short, let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best |
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 Nostalgia is like grammar. We find the present tense and the past perfect |
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 My girlfriend bought herself a smart car... It won't let her in |
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Because there are unexpected number of children waiting for him Let's hope they are not underage
 I had a threesome last night. The kids loved it |
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Hi, in case you need Russian localization or anything related, feel free to reach out to me For more info, see here |
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Thank you for showing the whole forum you are a worthless employee.
Instead, you browsed the rules quickly or assumed this campaigns rules were the same as all other campaigns. You're at fault here for not keeping up with your job and doing it correctly. Be a man and accept responsibility for your mistakes.
Worthless employee? Because I pointed out your mistake? Ok. I stand by my words that you are at fault here and not the campaign participants due to the unclear rules Well, I wouldn't call that a mistake If we apply strict, formal logic here, there is nothing you can pit against yahoo62278 regarding this specific rule. The only thing which is somewhat out of whack here is that you wouldn't really expect only 1 post to be counted in the Gambling Discussion board for a casino signature campaign. Personally, I thought it was a typo on the manager's part. But after it has been made abundantly clear in the thread that it is a correct provision (and twice at that), there is nothing you could do but obey the rules or suffer the consequences |
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Problem is that people are not reading the rules, so no point complaining to manager and his rules There's something else to add That is, everyone participating in any signature campaign should be closely following their campaign thread, and keep a weather eye on what the boss has to say there. This specific rule has been explained twice by the campaign manager in the thread, so even if it is against the "common sense", i.e. what is assumed by most (I assumed that too, just in case), any confusion and misunderstanding should have been dispelled |
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The specific rule below is quite confusing to me, as in my understanding using my common sense, if it's only 1 is counted in gambling discussion board, then only 4 should also be counted in gambling board, and I saw there are posters who made over 4 posts in this board, yet all posts are considered qualified And how does it help you personally? That is, even if only 5 posts at max were counted in the Gambling board? Proceeding from your own assumption, you should have made 4-5 posts in Gambling and 1 post in Gambling Discussion (i.e. 5 in total to be counted) |
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Correct, there is no rule that a certain number can be in gambling discussion. The rule is only 1 post in that section will count. I'm sorry you didn't read that rule, it was pretty clear. That means if you did 8 posts in gambling discussion then 7 will not count.
How exactly is it clear? You are reiterating the same thing. There should have been a rule saying that 1 out of the 25 required posts can be in the gambling discussion section The rule is saying that quite explicitly Another matter it is not what you would normally expect from a casino signature campaign, and in that I agree with you. That's why I felt it would be better to clarify this point further and asked just that. Here's the reply |
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It is amazing to see that how well these blockchain oracles based projects are received by the market, they have become an instant hit and they have proven to be significant role players in blockchain and crypto ecosystem and that is the reason for the continuous demand and success of these projects That's because blockchain oracles are quintessential to smart contracts As explained in the article, without oracles smart contracts can't do much. Indeed, they can still shuffle funds here and there on the blockchain, but as soon as we need something real, we need information from the world, that is to say, our world, with all its arbitrariness, randomness, half-truths, lies, damned lies, and, well, stats. In a sense, oracles are making smart contracts real as distinguished from the pristine and immaculate world of their self-contained blockchains, which are a thing unto itself (figuratively speaking) |
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The first part of a new big article about Blockchain Oracles published on stealthex.io. A prologue to this piece about DeFi can be found here. Your feedback is greatly appreciated, as always
Blockchain Oracles: Connecting the WorldsMany blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, and most importantly, Bitcoin and Ether, have become notorious for transaction failures, primarily due to scalability issues. And that’s pretty much all when we talk about plain-vanilla Bitcoin and its copycats like Litecoin or its clones like Bitcoin Cash. But with blockchains like Ethereum or EOS, which expand into the far reaches of a new territory known as smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps), this is only the tip of the iceberg. In other words, only a beginning. What hides below the surface, and thus rarely emerges in public discussions about cryptocurrencies, is the closed-off nature of smart contract-enabled blockchains. To be ever so slightly useful, smart contracts and dApps running on top of them must have access to real-world data which is immensely off-chain, while they are permanently stuck within the constraints of their tiny on-chain world. So how do they escape out of the straitjackets put on them by their restrictive environments? That’s where blockchain oracles come into play. And what role do they play, exactly?Enabling smart contracts and dApps to interact with the outside world opens both endless possibilities and a big can of worms. Now that the entire world is made available to a smart contract, it can take an input from an external source of information, make some calculations that require this data or arrive at a decision based on it, and then get down to some work like moving contractually-locked funds from Alice to Bob. Or from Bob to Alice, depending on the verdict. Sounds cool, huh? But here's the catch. As transactions on a smart contract blockchain are supposed to be irreversible (while the blockchain itself immutable), it can lead to catastrophic consequences if the input has been tampered with or just happens to be incorrect for some arbitrary reason, not necessarily ill in intent. This fundamental problem of internalizing the outside world for on-chain execution of contractual agreements on smart contract blockchains has become most apparent with the advent of Decentralized Finance (or simply DeFi) a few years ago. DeFi is a promising new kid on the blockchain arena. It hinges on the idea of decentralizing most financial services that we use today, but without a bank or other financial institution in the middle. It is envisioned that with the help of smart contracts and dApps using them we will be able to lend money and borrow with collateralized digital assets, offer and receive banking services including mortgages and insurance, buy and sell digital assets safely on decentralized marketplaces, as well as issue stablecoins and user tokens. Pretty impressive list, isn’t it? However, for all of this to work properly we need trustless and reliable sources of information outside the blockchain that provide inputs to dApps running on that blockchain. DeFi requires trustless data feeds about the state of the world to ensure correct on-chain execution of smart contracts powering dApps. But how do we get these and manage to retrieve external data that cannot be verified through cryptography but that we can still trust and rely on? Entities that provide off-chain data for on-chain consumption are called blockchain oracles. Technically, an oracle is an interface through which a smart contract queries and retrieves information from an external source of truth. As it turns out, DeFi is not the only field of application where blockchain oracles turn up quite handy, but since their use is most indispensable there, it makes sense to delve deeper into this area. Oracles of DeFiToday, the space is crowded with a plethora of players that aim at providing DeFi with so much needed real-time market information, for example, digital asset prices. There are many forms of oracles, but the most important distinction is drawn between centralized and decentralized ones. As DeFi is supposed to be a trustless, decentralized environment, the decentralized oracles are the flesh and blood of this ecosystem, so we are mostly concerned here with this type of blockchain oracles (just in case, there are centralized oracles too). DeFi platforms deploy various oracle solutions in their pursuit of retrieving real-time information about the market price of digital assets. The most well known among these is the MakerDAO lending platform which uses an oracle module called the Medianizer to obtain the real-time exchange prices. Technically, it is a smart contract that accepts price updates from independent data feeds, discards false ones along with outliers, and calculates the median price (hence the name) to be used as a reference for other smart contracts. Another blockchain-based borrowing and lending platform, Compound, uses administrators who are holders of the platform’s native COMP token. They manage and control price feeds through aggregator contracts they create. Authorized sources of information called reporters are then queried for reference prices by aggregators which verify the data and calculate median values to be used internally. A somewhat similar approach is utilized by AmpleForth, a developer of a stablecoin with elastic supply, and Synthetix, a platform for creating crypto-backed synthetic versions of assets like commodities, stocks, indices, cryptocurrencies, and fiat. On the other hand, there are a few blockchain projects that provide decentralized oracle services to other platforms and blockchains, mostly Ethereum and EOS. Such projects as Provable (formerly Oraclize), ChainLink, Band Protocol, Tellor aim at providing blockchain-agnostic protocols that allow query and retrieval of virtually any type of reference data in a standardized manner. As authenticity and veracity of the information retrieved is of crucial importance to its consumers, these projects run their own decentralized blockchains whose primary task is to validate data feeds and check that the information received is authentic and has not been tampered with. Realistically, these special-purpose blockchains come closest to the implementation of a blockchain oracle idea in a truly decentralized and trustless way. To be continuedIn the second part of this two-part article we will look into other uses of blockchain oracles beyond DeFi, and talk about potential problems and pitfalls of this nascent technology, as well as approaches used to deal with them. Stay with us and remain in the know! |
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 – Why is the CEO of Apple so rich? – Because he bears the fruit of success! |
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And, more importantly, did you understand the meaning of this text? You are prohibited from using "the services as anonymizing proxy, VPN or the like in order to bypass the law resulting from the blockade by Gamdom.com countries". Well, it could be written in better terms and wording indeed, but the meaning is still pretty clear. In simple language, you can't use VPNs and similar services if your country is blacklisted by the casino. Let me explain in case there's a difficulty. It is not the use of VPNs as such that is prohibited here, but their use with the aim of bypassing these country-specific restrictions
I simply understand it as : A player is responsible for any legal case result from using Gamdom.com if his country prohibits gambling. Gamdom do not encourage players to use VPN or any bypassing tool just to use the site if the resident country of the player prohibits/blocks online gambling Well, there are subtle differences in our understanding As I see it, it is not about certain countries prohibiting gambling. Rather, it is about countries that are banned by Gamdom specifically and people trying to bypass this ban by using VPNs, etc. If it really were the way you see it ("if the resident country of the player prohibits/blocks online gambling"), you wouldn't be allowed to use Gamdom at all, through VPN or otherwise. Since VPN's are mentioned and they are used to hide your country of residence, it is evidently the second case, i.e. the casino doesn't want players from the countries they blacklisted, for whatever reason, and irrespective of whether gambling is allowed there or not. At least, this is what follows from this text |
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