[ANN] Reality Keys: An oracle letting you use external state in transactions

[edmundedgar]

thanks for your answer!

Just a tiny bug I stumbled over: at: https://www.realitykeys.com/freebase/203/ the "headline": "Champion of 2010 FIFA World Cup to be Spain national football team" the links are somehow not correct. If I click on FIFA World Cup it links me to the Spain nation football team and the other way around.

Nice catch, fixed.

Btw: It would be very interesting for us if you would provide keys for the current difficulty then we could do these with your site: https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/difficulty/
Since you are already using the blockchain.info API it should not be too complicated.

Again - congrats for this cool project.

Yup, should be doable, I'll take a look.

[edmundedgar]

And speaking of IsStandard, what are the prospects of less restrictive rules any time soon, perhaps only for P2SH scripts?

You may have seen this but Gavin's written a pull request that would open up the whole set of legal-but-non-standard scripting for P2SH transactions, subject to a specific DoS-related limitation in the number of signature checks.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/4365

If and when this gets into a release - I'm very optimistic that it will - that will make the non-standard pattern I described up-thread using this script standard, avoiding the need to push to Eligius or work around the standard checks with ECC key combination clevers.

[edmundedgar]

Btw: It would be very interesting for us if you would provide keys for the current difficulty then we could do these with your site: https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/difficulty/
Since you are already using the blockchain.info API it should not be too complicated.

We're just finishing up an upgrade to the "blockchain" facts to include block difficulty, and also switching from blockchain.info to blockr.io, which will allow us to support Testnet and a number of alt-chains that they monitor.

While we're working on this, does have suggestions for related things they'd like included in this release? For example, we currently do address balances and total amounts received, but we don't currently cover the individual transactions that are producing those balances and amounts. If we did, would that be useful to anyone, and if so what would you want specifically?

PS. I should mention the awesome help we got from blockr.io. I asked them for a new API call last Wednesday, it was live by Friday.

[fairlay]

sounds very good - we will use the difficulty "keys"!

[edmundedgar]

sounds very good - we will use the difficulty "keys"!

OK, this is now live. You can select "difficulty" here:
https://www.realitykeys.com/blockchain/new
...to check the difficulty on a particular date.

You can also create and check these facts via our API:
https://www.realitykeys.com/developers#blockchain

After setting this up I took a look at the Fairlay site and realized that you're looking at block numbers rather than dates. Can you work with it this way, or do you need to be able to set a block number? (If that's what you need, it shouldn't be a big drama to add it.)

[edmundedgar]

This mostly covers things already discussed on this thread, but we've written up some information about transaction patterns etc for creating contracts, with links to a couple of working examples:

https://www.realitykeys.com/developers/resources

[edmundedgar]

A quick update on our Freebase data source: Yesterday Google announced that they'll be closing Freebase to new edits at the end of March, 2015:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/freebase-discuss/s_BPoL92edc

We liked having Freebase there as a big, general data source allowing you to formulate pretty much any factual proposition in the known universe. We'll take a look at other options and see if we can replace it with something that performs the same role, although at this point we can't guarantee we'll be able to find something suitable, and if we do we're not sure whether we'll be able to seamlessly migrate the outstanding facts currently in our database over to it.

As of today we've stopped accepting new Freebase facts beyond March, 2015, since we're not yet sure that we'll be able to do automated resolution on them. We don't have a huge number of Freebase facts currently registered beyond that date, so in this case if we're unable to find a suitable replacement data source we plan to have a human settle them free of charge when their settlement dates come up in 2015 and 2016.

[flix]

Any ideas on how to combine the RealityKeys oracle with this:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Binary_options

[tonych]

Any ideas on how to combine the RealityKeys oracle with this:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Binary_options

A price oracle already exists, and yes it enables trading binary options.
See https://medium.com/byteball/making-p2p-great-again-episode-iii-prediction-markets-f40d49c0abab