getting information from a website to a
contract and that's something that we do
a reality keys but I want to talk
something about something a bit broader
today so this is kind of an ideal smart
contract this is our insurance contract
so I've kind of skipped the stuff where
we set up a policy but we've just got
the claim function there so what we'd
like to be able to do is we'd like to
speak to the absolute contract that
knows everything and get the answer back
doesn't exist and what is truth anyway
so today is just talk through a little
bit of theory and then go into some
practical problems and some solutions
and then hopefully at the end you'll see
so there's this idea running right
through Western civilization right
through from Plato beginning of the 16th
century the objective truth it's out
there it's consistent it's eternal it's
absolute and this originally was thought
to apply not just to kind of factual
stuff like has my office burned down but
also to moral stuff to values then and
then in the in the early Christian
thinking they took this whole foundation
with them and they also had it a
hierarchy so you had the Pope at the top
and the Pope was infallible so you've
got objective truth and you you can
pretty much find out what it is at least
about certain things and then in the
16th century Martin Luther made his epic
post nailed to a door on a church
in Germany allegedly this is this is
disputed and he said
wrong and after that we had kind of
hundreds of years of religious wars in
Europe well people fought over their
conceptions of the absolute objective
truth and one of the strategies that
allowed people to stop killing each
other and live together was to separate
truth into different baskets so you have
things like scientific truth which is
considered kind of objective and that
you shouldn't really disagree about and
then you had other value judgments that
were we're not we're not considered
objective and even this bit of
objectivity is something that some
recent philosophers have got a little
bit suspicious of so post modernists
think something more like this
disagreement in language so the idea is
that when we make claims we're playing a
language game we've got a kind of a
consensus system and something is true
to the extent that it follows the rules
of that language game right so it's true
if you obey the consensus rules now well
this has been going on there's something
kind of weird happening in politics the
internet is having this weird kind of
crisis about truth so we've got on the
one hand this vast internet knowledge
but at the same time you've got people
embracing alternative facts and you've
got basically entirely made up news
circulating freely on Facebook
and deciding presidential elections and
this is for two reasons the first
created to help with the problem and
then I want to talk about an approach
called subjective accuracy which can
help with the perspective problem so
there are people out there on Facebook
who are trying to hack your brain
anyone in your social network
or any paid advertiser can push claims
into your stream and you have to work
out what to believe when you're faced
with a claim if you were prepared to
spend a lot of time and money evaluating
it and researching it then you could
probably do quite a good job of getting
to the bottom of it but since you're not
prepared to do that you end up
potentially believe leaving a lot of
and this is a kind of a pattern
that you see a lot in information
security and also in for example missile
defense there's this asymmetry between
the attackers job and the defenders job
because the attacker can just hit us
with the entire this entire barrage of
and we've got to defend every
time to be successful and even if the
attacker can't manage to get their
through every time they can
bring off a kind of a denial of service
attack against the truth because if you
can hit people with enough stories and
enough claims they just lose confidence
that they can evaluate any of them and
then when they see something true they
they can't they can't they can't
evaluate that either so you end up being
able to steal from them without them
noticing
so what we've tried to do is to increase
the cost of attacking and decrease the
top the cost of defense so this is
reality check this is Mechanical Turk
meets Snopes on the blockchain the rule
is that anybody can ask a question and
anybody can answer a question and that
anybody can be you or it can be your
contract so we make no no no distinction
there and the goal is that people who
give the right answer are going to get
rewarded and make profits and people who
give the wrong answer are going to make
losses so we can ask a question like
this this is why the the DAP or like
this using a contract so we're passing
in a template ID there that I won't get
into there's also the text of the
question a challenge timeout and an
arbitrator I'll say the arbitrator later
so the question is going to show up on
the blockchain and therefore on this
website and you can come out come in if
you see a question you know the answer
to then you can post and
like this or from a contract like this
now when you post an answer you're also
sending some money this is a bond so
this is money that you're going to lose
if you're wrong and you're gonna get a
get back if you're right
and by wrong and right I mean that your
answer whether your answer is decided by
the system as the final answer now every
time you you post an answer if you see
an answer that's wrong and you want to
correct that answer you can always do
that but you have to double the bond so
once that's happened once the timeout
period is elapsed you can get the final
answer from your contract like this so
if we know the question ID we just pull
it in give us our answer sometimes you
want to do something more like this
sometimes you didn't ask the question
yourself but you want to take any answer
that adequately answers a particular
question also with a reasonable
arbitrator and with a reasonable timeout
and so you can in that case you can get
the final answer if it matches these
particular criteria so your user can
send you a question ID and then you
check that question either with the
contract and if it's right you go ahead
and use the answer so you're probably
wondering what happens if somebody keeps
on putting money on something that
that's untrue and is prepared to put
serious money to back there there there
lie and what happens is the person who
happens it's going to escalate so you
end up with quite a lot of money in
bonds resting on this particular
question and then once that happens we
get a serious amount of money in the
pool and somebody is gonna want to use
that money to pay our arbitrator now the
arbitrator sounds like a person and it
can be a person but it's a contract so
it can also be a decision making process
it doesn't have to be cheap it doesn't
have to be fast but it does have to be
able to get us our answer and we do have
to trust it so it's kind of like the the
Pope in the medieval um metaphysics
there now for a lot of
this is gonna be the right solution and
we're going to be able to construct an
arbitrator that suits your security
needs in particular it's often going to
be better than what people have been
doing at the moment where they're
pulling data from some website and even
if the middleware that gets them that
data is correct that website is there
Pope and often the website or the
websites that you're pulling from even
if they're backed by some fairly
reliable provider aren't actually
secured with the kind of assumptions
that we make when we're dealing with
magical internet money so we've got
ourselves to a place where we don't have
to call on this arbitrator very often
and we can use an expensive process so
the the lip the arbitrator could
literally hire somebody to go down and
look at my office and see if it's burnt
down out of the gate this is a service
that we'll be offering a reality keys
but we also think it's a great fit for
things like all industry consortiums if
you've done any work in the private
blockchain space it seems like everyone
wants to make a consortium to do
blockchain stuff and then they come and
talk to guys like us and they say what
should I do with my consortium this is
really somewhere where these existing
industry players could leverage their
their existing brands and their
expertise you can also make this a
socially expensive process so for
example if you've had an IC o---- and
you've got you've got some people who
are supposed to be delivering particular
milestones you might say we want to pay
them if they reach these milestones and
we're gonna check that with reality
check but the arbitrator is going to be
a vote of the token holders so in most
cases you're not gonna have to call on
them but if you do then you can so a
reality check doesn't care it just lets
you supply your arbitrator and it sets
things up so that the arbitrator only
has to get called on if very
occasionally and that when they do get
called on they can charge very
attractive fees so this is our attack
our application deployed on on the
rinkeby test net I've also posted our
Gator channel there the plan is that
we're gonna take feedback for a couple
of weeks on the details of the API and
stuff in case anyone it has any thoughts
then get out to an audit and hopefully
have it
you know live on the main net very soon
so that's the efficiency problem but I
want to talk about another problem which
is perspective so for years we've been
serving data on the question what is the
price of Bitcoin and that's been a
fairly factual question for most of that
time there was a point when we had some
funny data coming from Mount GOx which
eventually went away but generally
speaking was very straight forward but
then next month when the fork happens
this becomes a fairly contentious
question and it's really not clear at
all what the right answer is going to be
to the question what's the price of
Bitcoin you know there are gonna be at
least two or three bitcoins around that
you could possibly take the price off
and maybe should have them together and
you know who knows so that's a question
that really depends on your point of
view and perspective is quite a tricky
problem for consensus systems if you
look at the original problem that
Bitcoin was trying to solve you've got
all these nodes on the network and they
all have a different perspective on the
network so they all see transactions at
different times and what you want to
know is given two transactions that have
been sent which one was sent earlier and
that's something that about which every
node will legitimately have a different
opinion so I thought she just kind of
punted on this and so she's genius was
to realize that it was actually okay to
punt on this question so Bitcoin or a
theory and we'll just really just pick
one and it'll you know and and what
it'll promise you is that if you give if
you ask it again then with an increasing
probability it'll give you the same
answer again so if we're trying to get
the truth of a proposition it's not
really clear that this answer will do it
for us we don't really just want punt on
anything that has perspective involved
especially because things like the price
of Bitcoin a lot of things actually turn
out to have perspective when it maybe
seemed like they didn't so we want the
answer but there is no the answer now
this is something where we've managed to
handle in blockchain systems when we're
dealing not with the transactions on top
of the blockchain but with the basic
rules of governance of the blockchain
so what we did with the the dow hack or
what we did with Bitcoin and Bitcoin
cash was when there was a serious
dispute over governance we fought the
chain so if you have a Bitcoin before
that fork then you have Bitcoin and
Bitcoin cash after the fork and if you
have ether before the fork you have it
ether and EDC after the fork and this
gives you kind of a slightly strange but
kind of remarkable kind of security in
that especially from the point of view
of the minority if you lose to the
minority of the majority if the decision
making process in force goes against you
you still have the ability to continue
with your own chain you still have the
ability to follow your own rules and it
may be that even if in the short term
the market goes against you who knows
maybe in the long term
you will also find that your token is
more valuable than the other one and
even if it doesn't then you still get to
do what you want to do so this is a
great fit for handling disagreements
about reality what we can do is embrace
perspective and embrace subjectivity so
what we need is opinionated money so
we've written a token contract it's
about 100 lines of solidity and it
commits every day to any number of new
world views so every day you can create
new branches on it and cause it to fork
and each of those branches were
represented a different world view so in
each of those branches then the the
contract knows how much money you should
have and it'll allow you to spend money
that's that's on the some parallel
chains twice but not money that's on the
same chain so it looks something like
this so if you wanted to know did my
office burn down one person might say it
did and one other person might say it
didn't so we have two forks and you can
keep your money on on either or both now
once we can do this your smart contract
no longer needs to choose between these
different allegedly objective realities
so if you've got a bed on did Trump or
Hillary win election you don't need the
smart contract to choose which one which
of those things happened you don't even
need that to be an objective truth about
which one of those things happened your
contract just pays the person who thinks
that Hillary won on Hillary won on the
branch that says Hillary won and pays
the the person who bet the Trump won on
any branch that says Trump won so we can
take all of that stuff all the objective
stuff right out of the contract and put
it into the social realm now at this
point people always worry that if we've
got these hundreds of thousands of facts
and we're branching on all of them we're
gonna have just an unfathomable number
of of branches but this is quite a nice
fit for our arbitration contracts
because our arbitration contracts in
reality check represents a process for
forgetting resolving a bunch of facts
and so you have a large number of facts
that are all hid around
hid behind that contract so what we can
do here is you commit to a whitelist of
arbitrators once you think that an
arbitrator is bad you can just remove
that arbitrator from the whitelist and
what anyone can just publish a branch
that removes that that arbitrator from
from the whitelist and this means that
we no longer have to trust our
arbitrators arbitrators because if the
arbitrator is bad the economy can just
route around them so we can do this
whole thing without needing needing that
the trust so very quickly I just want to
compare a couple of code examples so
this is the claim function with a pope
right this is the claim function with an
arbitrator who the contract already
thinks it's going to trust so what we're
doing there is we're checking the
question that somebody feet somebody
feeds us to question ID and when we
check the question and then we send them
so in this case the balance of all
tokens held by the contract to that
person this is the same contract on
subject democracy so the claim function
is a little bit different we've got a
branch parameter and
arbitrated parameter and the first thing
we do is we go to the token contract and
we ask it on this branch is this Alice
is this arbitrator legit and if the
arbitrator is legit then we go ahead and
all the rest is just the same except for
the very last line where that token
payment also specifies a branch so once
we have opinionated money like this
people are welcome to play their own
language games and embrace their own
worldviews so you're entitled to your
own opinion hell you're also entitled to
your own facts
this is aetherium it's it's
permissionless it's free you can do what
you like but if you won't play a
language game with somebody else you're
gonna have to persuade those other
people the world that you're trying to
inhabit is interesting so we'll see what
kind of values the markets actually want
to assign to those different branches
and we'll also see what people actually
want to use so Kellyanne Kong where's
welcome to her alternative facts if he
wants them that's absolutely fine but
we'll see what universe what worldview
what set of facts uses if she wants to
say ensure her house and get reliable
data when it burns down so if like me
you're excited about this then please
come and talk to us on our Geeta Channel
I've also put all the things this was a
piece I wrote last year about this also
links to Vita leaks writing on subject
democracy where he did a lot of legwork
so please please do come and talk to us
the reality token thing is nearly ready
to go but this thing we're still kind of
batting around different models and so
we'd love to hear what you think okay
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