[ANN] Early Temple, an Oracle for contracts on real-world conditions

[Charles Hope]

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.

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[vertak]

Just used Early Temple to make a contract and it succeeded! Some others and I are developing software that may end up needing any oracle to sign transactions, which is how I originally found Early Temple. Have you thought about making this in some way a distributed oracle? Early Temple is a single point of failure for any app that uses it, and that's why my team is holding back from using it.

[Charles Hope]

Just used Early Temple to make a contract and it succeeded! Some others and I are developing software that may end up needing any oracle to sign transactions, which is how I originally found Early Temple. Have you thought about making this in some way a distributed oracle? Early Temple is a single point of failure for any app that uses it, and that's why my team is holding back from using it.

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.

[kolinko]

As for distributed oracles - there's now Orisi.org of course

[profitofthegods]

Looks good and very simple to use. Oracles certainly seem to be a hot topic at the moment, with the Codius launch and so on. I hope people share how they are using this here because I'd love to read some real life examples!

[Charles Hope]

Codius looks very interesting. Thanks for the heads up!

The scene is really starting to heat up this year.

[kolinko]

The scene is really starting to heat up this year.

"A rising tide lifts all boats"