[ANN] Shintaku: An End-to-End-Decentralized General-Purpose Blockchain Oracle

[kamiya.ryuuji]

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I've been working on a new general-purpose blockchain oracle system that's
fully end-to-end decentralized, with no trusted third party.

The design paper is available at:
https://gitlab.com/shintaku-group/paper/raw/master/shintaku.pdf

The main properties:
* End-to-end decentralized architecture.
* No trusted third parties with control over the system.
* Participants can be anonymous; the system is completely permissionless.
* Does not require peripheral constructs, such as reputation, or prediction
markets, to function.
* Users are not forced to actively participate at assigned times.
* Highly parametrizable for a variety of applications.
* Fully upgradable design through opt-in, non-coercive forks.

Shintaku: An End-to-End-Decentralized General-Purpose Blockchain Oracle System

Abstract. Blockchains supporting execution of complex programs are at present
limited to intrachain interactions, without involving a trusted third party. A
completely end-to-end-decentralized oracle system would allow such blockchains
to safely accept and process arbitrary information from the outside world in a
manner that does not require trust in or permission from any singular entity. An
oracle design is proposed that decides on the outcome of binary propositions by
employing a stake-based voting scheme. Voters are incentivized to vote honestly
by being rewarded for agreeing with a majority. The effects of degenerate
distributions in the truthness or falseness of input propositions are eliminated
through random matching. This oracle design is incorporated into an
end-to-end-decentralized, blockchain-agnostic architecture.

Source code for implementation at: https://gitlab.com/shintaku-group/shintaku

Deployed token contract at:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x785c3570623f3d61225659744a5eb2ea83bc1e9d

Ryuuji Kamiya
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[Beejae]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

I've been working on a new general-purpose blockchain oracle system that's
fully end-to-end decentralized, with no trusted third party.

The design paper is available at:
https://gitlab.com/shintaku-group/paper/raw/master/shintaku.pdf

The main properties:
* End-to-end decentralized architecture.
* No trusted third parties with control over the system.
* Participants can be anonymous; the system is completely permissionless.
* Does not require peripheral constructs, such as reputation, or prediction
markets, to function.
* Users are not forced to actively participate at assigned times.
* Highly parametrizable for a variety of applications.
* Fully upgradable design through opt-in, non-coercive forks.

Shintaku: An End-to-End-Decentralized General-Purpose Blockchain Oracle System

Abstract. Blockchains supporting execution of complex programs are at present
limited to intrachain interactions, without involving a trusted third party. A
completely end-to-end-decentralized oracle system would allow such blockchains
to safely accept and process arbitrary information from the outside world in a
manner that does not require trust in or permission from any singular entity. An
oracle design is proposed that decides on the outcome of binary propositions by
employing a stake-based voting scheme. Voters are incentivized to vote honestly
by being rewarded for agreeing with a majority. The effects of degenerate
distributions in the truthness or falseness of input propositions are eliminated
through random matching. This oracle design is incorporated into an
end-to-end-decentralized, blockchain-agnostic architecture.

Source code for implementation at: https://gitlab.com/shintaku-group/shintaku

Deployed token contract at:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x785c3570623f3d61225659744a5eb2ea83bc1e9d

Ryuuji Kamiya
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When Airdrop? 😉

[mar.ci]

Brilliant work. Finally oracle solution based purely on economic incentives / game theory and not relying on complicated constructs like reputation systems (~trust), etc.

I have a few questions though:

Does this oracle solution expects one staking token per application or do you propose deployed SHN token contract as the one and only token sufficient for any use case? Has the deployed contract been audited by some third party and sufficiently tested or does it currently only serve as a prototype?

Looking at the current voting contract (Shintaku.sol), I see there are basically only 2 voting options (+ undecided option). Could all oracle problems be reduced to this binary true/false voting? Guess what I'm lacking is some sort of formalized API for what does a proposition look like (for example, could "Temperature according to weather.com at 13:00 UTC at NY is 20 degrees Celsia" be a proposition? I find it cumbersome as this expects human interpretation and is slow and potentially non-deterministic. I guess I can imagine a separate contract that would accept some pairs of questions+answers where the question would be one of many types of programmatically executable tasks (i.e. http request) and the answer proposed correct replicable/programatically verifiable answer (i.e. http response) and proposition in voting contract would thus be a simple link to this question+answer pair. Edit: Nevermind, I just found in code description of the Proposition ID, which is exactly that. In any case,  most of this type of propositions I assume would be TRUE, so doesn't this lead to imbalance of TRUE/FALSE propositions and thus low rewards for verifying? I guess in system like deciding on truthfullness of some linked web news article this balance might not be a problem as there are many true and many fake news articles, but I don't see how this could be generalized (for example verifying correct temperature in specific time and location). Who and why would willingly send false proposition with a bounty to a clique? Could you please further explain how could this system be used as general-purpose oracle? Are you or anyone else developing some sort of formalized API for different use cases?

One more question related to token contract:

The token contract owner may withdraw collected ether after a long period of time (50 periods, or ~2 years).

There is no reason for contract owner to be able to withdraw some forgotten funds. They should be allowed to be withdrawn only by user indefinitely or have them locked. I prefer former.

[dzkrb1966]

Question team. Do you understand that your project is not ready for presentation to investors? Without technical documentation, white paper, roadmap and team information, you will not have the investment.