Abstract
Oracles were trusted sources of knowledge for public deliberation in classical Athens. Very much like expert and technical knowledge, divine advice was embedded in the deliberation and decision-making process of the democratic Assembly. While the idea of religious divination is completely out of place in our contemporary democracies, oracles made a technological comeback with modern computer science and cryptography and, more recently, the emergence of the blockchain as a “trust machine”. This paper reviews the role of oracles in Athenian democracy and, stemming from the renewed use of the term in computer sciences and cryptography, analyses the case of oracles in the nascent blockchain ecosystem. The paper also proposes a sociotechnical approach to the use of distributed oracles as informational devices to assist deliberative processes in digital democracy settings, and considers the limits that such an approach may face.
Highlights
On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released to the world the genesis block of the “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that he had announced in a cryptography mailing list two months earlier (Nakamoto, 2008)
This paper has examined the role of oracles as informational and knowledge-seeking devices in different domains
We started by providing an overview about the use of divine oracles in Athenian democracy, a topic that is still the object of academic debate, and reviewed the use of the term in modern computer sciences and cryptography
Summary
On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released to the world the genesis block of the “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” that he had announced in a cryptography mailing list two months earlier (Nakamoto, 2008). Oracles are provided in many different ways (e.g., degree of decentralization) and with corresponding features (e.g., robustness, reliability, accuracy) These features are important because even where a particular blockchain protocol is considered secure, oracles can be points of weakness for smart contracts (e.g., inaccurate or compromised data). Blockchain-enabled smart contracts provide a collective choice infrastructure that enables new possibilities for digital democracy (e.g., Allen et al, 2019a) Before exploring these possibilities and a taxonomy of the oracle requirements and challenges in this context, it is worthwhile considering two other blockchain use cases— decentralized finance and energy. These two sectors are more advanced in their real-world development compared to digital democracy platforms.
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