Codius looks very interesting. Thanks for the heads up!

The scene is really starting to heat up this year.

There are a few oracles around. I created one, called Early Temple, which handles conditional payments based on a phrase appearing on a given webpage. I ship a custom client as well, because typical clients can't handle the protocol required.

I think the lack of client support is really the major stumbling block for the field.

I don't have any plans to turn Early Temple into a distributed service, but would rather focus on serving high reliability, and building protocols that protect users even in case of an outage.

I'd love to hear about your project, if you can talk about it publicly yet.

I haven't seen anything about plans for an API, so people can write clients for it like Bitcoind. Anything coming?

Yeah, I noticed. Several days and not a single block won. Are people testing GPUs here?

It was all very strange. Soon after I posted this message, suddenly the network came back to life, and caught me up rather quickly. So now I'm turning on CPU mining, so I can earn some development coins, and also contribute to the other developers out there.

Installing bitcoind on a brand new Mac, with plenty of memory, and I set it for testnet. Downloading most of the blockchain has taken 24 hours, but now loading the last two weeks has ground to a snail's pace. My download bandwidth is just over 1Mb.

This is what over 10 minutes of activity looks like:


I know this isn't normal. Is there something I can do to speed this up?

Thanks!

The original speculation on this forum discussing autonomous agents was one of my biggest inspirations for building my Oracle, Early Temple.

How would an agent be able to engage in trade with a human being, without the possibility of cheating? Suppose, for instance, the agent wants to purchase time in a cloud server to run a copy of itself.  Or the agent offers to pay a programmer for an upgrade.  How does the agent prevent getting ripped off, or how does a human prevent being cheated by a malware agent?

They need a trusted third party.  An Oracle, which can judge if the digital good was sold, or the work was completed, and release the funds.

The agent could create a contract using Early Temple's basic protocol, and commit funds using an m-of-n address. The agent would then send a partially signed payment transaction to the human, who would also be able to check the Early Temple contract page and verify the payment condition.  Once that condition is met, the human goes back to the Early Temple contract page and they get their payment transaction signed.

So this is up and running already, and you guys just need to write the agent!

(The agent doesn't even need to have enough intelligence to figure out that it needs a plug-in.  There could be a more general method where programmers are permitted to submit patches, and the network tests out these submitted patches on a small number of nodes, and it finds those nodes work better and earn more money, then the programmer receives their payment.)

Early Temple http://earlytemple.com is an Oracle for resolving contracts based on real-world conditions. Inspired by Mike Hearn's theoretical discussion of proposed servers that stand as neutral judges for contracts, Early Temple uses m-of-n addresses, it supports a basic protocol of conditional coin transfer when scraping a web page reveals a given phrase.

A downloadable command line client is available for handling m-of-n addresses, and handling the sending side of the protocol, by interfacing with a locally running Bitcoind.

I've been around the NYC Bitcoin scene since last summer, and I gave a demo at the BitDevs at xCubicle a few months ago, before the client was ready. Without the client, users have to interact with the Bitcoind command line itself, which is onerous. The client and protocol rely on standard transactions.

I'm seeing much of discussion of Oracles lately, and I think we are reaching an inflection point in exploring new business models and protocols.

Next steps will be to implement contract lifespan, so that if the condition is not met by a certain time, the money is refunded to the sender, instead of remaining in the contract forever.