<aside> <img src="/icons/chat_green.svg" alt="/icons/chat_green.svg" width="40px" /> The first draft of history will be the raw on-chain event feed, written directly to the ledger of record by billions of writers and sensors around the world.
https://thenetworkstate.com/technoeconomic-axes
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Too often, when we are confronted with a deluge of information, we struggle to make sense of it and to decide if we can trust it. What would happen if people always had access to enough relevant, trusted information to take meaningful action?
When it went online, the internet promised a revolutionary new level of access to information for all people. Now, a few decades into the information age, we recognize new challenges:
On its own, transparency can be used as a weapon. Transparency might give us access to unlimited information, while making it difficult to discern what is most important. Headlines, status updates, and advertisements light up our screens so quickly that it’s hard to find space for deep thought and focused work.
As a result, our attention is scattered, we struggle to make meaning, and we are not sure who to trust. We want to collaborate on solving big problems, but often we struggle to agree on what the problems are in the first place. Globally, there is not yet sufficient trust to collaborate on solving our biggest problems.
It is possible to change this system.
There is plenty of information in the world. If we make spaces for meaningful collaboration and focused attention, then people will build trust. We can create systems for sharing information across spaces so that trust scales globally, enabling people to take collaborative action.
We know what it’s like to share trust with friends and family. We don’t need to reference a blockchain to decide whether to trust our closest collaborators. By connecting small networks of people, blockchains make it possible to reduce information overload and scale trust to a global level.
Let’s define an Oracle as anything that can provide verifiably true information to a blockchain from the “off-chain” world.
Existing Layer One blockchains have solved many financial accounting problems. At any time, we can review transaction history and blockchain state, and we can use that information to make future decisions. With Cardano, we can use transaction metadata and on-chain datum to store additional data on-chain.
However, just because data is on-chain does not mean it is true.
Take weather, for example. We could put a message on the blockchain that says that it was 75 degrees in San Diego, California on September 1st. And that information would be immutable. Anyone could look at it, and it would be accessible for as long as the blockchain is running.
The question is, how will people know that this information is true in the first place? Where did the data come from? Was there a reliable source? Was there an incentive for anyone to lie?