From Reality Keys to Oraclize. A Deep Dive into the History of Bitcoin Oracles

Abstract

Before the advent of alternative blockchains such as Ethereum, the future of decentralization was all in the hands of Bitcoin. Together with Nakamoto itself, early developers were trying to leverage Bitcoin potential to decentralize traditionally centralized applications. However, being Bitcoin a decentralized machine, available non-trustless oracles were considered unsuitable. Therefore, strategies had to be elaborated to solve the so-called oracle problem in the newborn scenario. By interviewing early developers and crawling early forums and repositories, this paper aims to retrace and reconstruct the chain of events and contributions that gave birth to oracles on Bitcoin. The evolution of early trust models and approaches to solving the oracle problem is also outlined. Analyzing technical and social barriers to building oracles on Bitcoin, the transition to Ethereum will also be discussed.

Literature background and methodology are deliberately omitted at this stage (preprint). To improve readability for a broader audience, the content is presented more like a story

References in corpus (3)

• SoK: Oracles from the Ground Truth to Market Manipulation
• Wrapping trust for interoperability. A study of wrapped tokens
• Blockchain Oracle Design Patterns

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Investigating Assumptions and Proposals for Blockchain Integration in the Circular Economy. A Delphi Study
• Cool, But What About Oracles? An Oracle-Based Perspective on Blockchain Integration in the Accounting Field
• Can Artificial Intelligence solve the blockchain oracle problem? Unpacking the Challenges and Possibilities