The SMT Oracles whitepaper.. [call for academics, modelers and deep thinkers]

in #smt-oracles7 years ago (edited)

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Lately I’ve been having lots of conversations about how Oracles can impact Rewards Pools in Smart Media Tokens (SMTs). People are interested in ways to leverage Oracles to create very unique communities I think for some key reasons:

  • SMT Oracles are all about using real world events confirmations to construct SMT rewards pools around incentivizing real world actions, such as exercising, writing and coding, as well as unique traits such as identity and geography.

  • the result of SMT Oracles ranges from democratized Steem-like tokens, which could be felt to be more “fair” and have better by products in the sense of wisdom of the crowd and content discovery, to endless job creation by autonomously incentivizing all sorts of real world behaviors while being safely decentralized

Currently I’m writing the SMT Oracles Whitepaper to expand on this system and the next phases of SMT development. By writing this paper, we’ll lay out clearly what’s needed technologically to augment the SMT operating system for the yet untapped use cases and job creation caused by bringing real world information to decentralized token distributions.

The economic and political mechanics of SMT Oracles are similar to Steem DPoS Witnesses - where instead of block and USD price-feed producing Witnesses, Oracles are paid for with SMT subsidies/new token emissions for pre-defined event-verification jobs and participants are voted into Oracle positions by stake-weighted voting of an SMT or a combination of SMTs. There are some other major differences, including the possibility of second levels of Oracles whose jobs are Quality Assurance, and the need for data consistency thresholds when determining consensus over how SMTs may be distributed.

If you find SMTs and SMT Oracles interesting, send me a message if you would contribute to the paper. Would love to hear from you. The best way to message me is @ned on https://Steemit.chat

For more background, two resources for SMT Oracles discussions so far are the SMT Whitepaper (https://SMT.steem.io) and this discussion with inertia: https://steemit.com/smt/@inertia/smt-oracle-decay-problem

Ned

Some of the outlines for the system:

Compensation control comes from potential loss of job - similar to Steem DPoS Witnesses.

Oracles data may need to overlap at some high threshhold, such as 75%, for the data to become consensus over allowing rewards distributions.

Quality Assurance Oracles may be subsidized to call out poor performance by first layer Oracles.

Potential Oracles need to compete with each other for jobs and exposure of poor performance is in the challengers' interests.

Consensus over permitting rewards distributions may come from anywhere between one and thirty elected Oracles. The number of Oracles is defined by the SMT creator.

Oracles as they affect SMTs Rewards Pools are only here to answer a simple question: Did the entity behind this account perform action X, or X+Y, or X+Y+N? If yes, publish the account on the Oracle's feed.

If you are a user trying to earn SMT, will you react in either scenario where a) Oracles are not including you (incorrectly) in their feed and b) where other are being included (incorrectly) in their feed. The answer is the user will react, likely publicly and on Steem, to both because they have an incentive to do so. This feedback loop strengthens Action/Event Feeds where Price Feeds lack because of the difference in potential loss for individual user-participants rather than socialized loss.

Some Oracle systems will fail, some will succeed.

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huh.jpg

Perhaps you are not the target audience 😂

que?
porque no?
I bought a steem ticket too
XD

Claro - please participate in the product!

The philosophical discussion works best with thise who understand the mechanism.

Nice post! What will happening, if someone resteem your post?

All the followers of the resteemer would see that post in their feed!

Oracles as they affect SMTs Rewards Pools are only here to answer a simple question: Did the entity behind this account perform action X, or X+Y, or X+Y+N? If yes, publish the account on the Oracle's feed.

I think there is room for Oracles to be able to be more nuanced and even dictate the reward-shares of posts and users.

For example — custom reputation computations are a great use case for Oracles. These computations can be complex, but based completely on the data from the Steem blockchain and easily audited using Merkle Proofs. Such reputation systems can be used in conjunction with staked SMTs to determine post and curation rewards. This opens up a door to a whole range of possible combinations that have the potential solve a variety of reward distribution challenges.

Possible applications — prediction market for posts! Such a market could be designed to reward the great content posted by unknown/new users and limit rewards for automated voting on whale posts.

Reputation systems can also enable gradual penalties for voting rings and Sybil-like behavior.

Did the entity behind this account perform action X, or X+Y, or X+Y+N?

I thought oracles were going to solve proof of unique individual are they not?

Yes. The action/question for the Oracle to answer could be: did this person perform all the actions necessary to prove they are a single person using only a single account? If yes, publish. If no, do not publish. This y/n verification keeps the approach simple for the Oracles.

Pseudonym parties may have a role to play here. @johan-nygren has ideas on how to solve the proof of unique individual problem.

Oracles seem to be part of it and pseudonym parties the other half.

What actions do you have in mind @ned, can you give an example? I have thought a little about it but still think it could be gameable..Anyhow Oracles sounds interesting.

yes, most things can be gameable.....
I think this Post is a request to get input of ideas on how to improve the code parameters ........for one example: so that they can't(or much more difficult to) be gamed.

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@ned sir please do something for steem coin price it is going down too much

@lays take it as an opportunty to get more steem as it is very cheap now...price will moon by next year, so stop complaining rather buy steem and power up and you will be all smiles next year ie after the HFORK 20 and SMT token implementation

That could happen. That is one possible outcome. But no need to buy STEEM today. There will be a chance to buy at less than $0.25 in a few months. If you want to load up, I'd wait until it gets a lot closer to hitting bottom

why would it drop to 0.25? why is it so low now?thanks for your explanation

STEEM will return to at least 0.001BTC and possibly go between 50-100% higher than that. At that time, 0.001BTC will likely be worth as much as £8-10.

Warning: This could be bullshit. Or it could be an accurate prediction based on an analysis of the markets by someone with an excellent talent for problem solving. I'm not sure which one it is.

I would exercise some restraint in case it is the latter. What you do is up to you, but asking Ned to sort it out is not really productive. He is obviously already concerned with the price as he has a considerably larger stake in STEEM than you or I. But some people who read a comment such as yours may be inclined to go sell their STEEM if they believe people to be worrying about the price.

You are hurting your cause, friend.

It is an inflationary coin! Try Powering up to SteemPower for inflation protection - plus you can use it to upvote!

Buying votes doesn't help the price

This comment has received a 0.75 % upvote from @buildawhale thanks to: @trumpdump. Send at least 1 SBD to @buildawhale with a post link in the memo field for a portion of the next vote.

To support our daily curation initiative, please vote on my owner, @themarkymark, as a Steem Witness

What's with the GIF? I thought this was about building a whale, not getting humped by one.

But, I suppose it is rather fitting considering one pretty much needs to bend over in front of a whale in order to make some worthy rewards around here.

Hahaha lol This is very funny

Hahahahaha!
Jajajajajaja!

Just me trying to be inclusive of le Spanish hombres.

I'll sell you some whale lube for SBD.

Lube is for pussies.

I need more of your comments. Gonna replace it with my current coke addiction.
jk about the coke addiction mom

Is that you trying to explain the humping in your logo? I'd be lost for words too.

Build A Whale... We may not always be successful, but we trying ;)

Is @ned a wizard? I don't know if he can simply snap his fingers and raise the Steem price on the open market.

Perhaps this is an inside joke.... in which case I am the fool.

It gave me a laugh though. And not at you. I too would like to see the price of Steem go up. It should. It is much better than alt coins going for $20 or more. But in a short term drop.... it is probably 100% out of @ned's control.

at least he can put fake holdings to make price stable

I think if he does anything FAKE and then someone finds out.... THAT could ruin Steem and steemit completely.

I don't think doing fake anything is the answer.

If @ned is still trying to diversify his portfolio and powering down his account to other crypto currencies he could stop and that would put less downward pressure on the price of STEEM. But that goes for all the early adopters and points out my previous points of needing other real world places to spend your STEEM on.

Steem is up. Perhaps you're the wizard :o

Great way to use vote buying!

The more that we can link STEEM to real world experiences or goods the more value it is going to have. If people have to always power down to get value for their STEEM the true potential of STEEM will never be realized.

SMT has great potential and it will fuel the Steem price steeply we are super excited to know more and more about it as it's the master stroke for the betterment of our future.
Thanks @ned
Regards
@oodeyaa

If the SMT still are not connected to real goods and services then they are just adding another layer onto the current problem of people powering down to get value. Why is it that people are wanting these tokens? What is going to make them want to convert their current cash into STEEM to make them want to buy it? Or will it be something else that people can earn with a time investment which they will power down to get value for and then compound the problem of downward pressure on STEEM.

This is exactly the problem I was just thinking about in my last post. There is an issue right now where the reward pool is shrinking and bloggers are upset. Of course as the reward pool shrinks every post has less potential for rewards, so some bloggers post more frequently as a result.

Any way which can expand the reward pool, provide opportunities for new participants to get rewarded, and also protect established bloggers with a history of producing quality content will be helpful. We all win by growing the Steemit economy in my opinion.

Smart oracles are a fantastic idea.

Does the shrinking reward pool matter if the price of STEEM is increasing?

I know it isn't now but couldn't it ultimately become a wash?

were just at the bottom of a rising cycle. The alt market should resume growth shortly and change the dynamic of the steemit ecosystem!

But we need the SMTs and other tools in order to drive demand for Steem. We all want to add value to Steem but there is only so much that content producers can do to drive demand for Steem with the current model. So by providing a bigger set of options for how people can add value to Steem this will allow people who have different skills to participate in building Steem up.

And you are correct it is possible if we just wait that eventually the price of Steem could go up on it's own but I think it's better to build the economy by adding value as much as we can to improve those odds.

Yes we need to expand the use case. Steem is unlikely to go up on its own as it is inflationary. We need to grow more than double per year to keep up with inflation. More than possible - if we expand the use case!

@taskmaster4450 and @dana-edwards
Yes, ideally, as more people join steemit AND BUY IN to steemit, then the price will go up at an equivalent rate and so.... even though you get fewer STEEM per post, they are worth more, so it is a wash.

But it won't ever be a perfect reflection. Other market factors etc. So ideally, if people can save and hold and just cash out at the right times, it will all work smoothly.

at the moment.... it isn't ideal.

Further increase of STEEM value through work with SMTs, front end apps etc should help.

Yes , you are right I have think this is something where we have to work

Cool!

which date is launching SMT i just heard many times about it but i don't see this happening kindly tell me @ned sir.

The more I think about this idea and it's dynamics the more I like it. Some questions though. Won't we need some manual mechanism to determine the entity performed the action in some cases?

For example if the action is relatively simple such as the entity created a website then based on evidence (and perhaps some of this evidence collection can be automated), this can be verified as true.

So one obvious example I can think of to use something like this is with photography. The real world action could be to take a photograph of an event for example. Photography would be very obvious and easy to verify. Something like coding on the other hand is a bit more difficult.

How can we be sure that the photography is of the actual event, and that it is original? This sounds like a semi-automated mturk job - there will have to be manual aspects to the oracles.

I am most interested in world improving efforts like planting trees and following up with them. Having oracles verify good deeds sounds like a really fun job that has the potential to change the world.

Well for example suppose you want a photograph of something which hasn't happened yet?

Oh fantastic. I am already seeing the revolution in news journalism with your example!

The 'job' must be declared, with certain specifications, as well as maximum entries I suspect. The oracles can process metadata for gps locations and a bit more information, can use certain image algorithms to sort faces, perhaps other text in photos, but will still need to manually review the filtered entries at some point.

There will be work involved or the oracles would be terminat....I mean friendly androids!

I am eagerly waiting for SMT. It will surely boost steem price. I am glad to know that @ned is working on it.

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Thanks for the information!

Great post
Your this post was also cool like your
Other post ... nice work 👍

@abhishek77
what about my this post?
Was it great and awesome like my that other post?
Oh I hope so.
It would say so much to me for it to be sew.

Wow. I cant wait i would love to start coding up an SMT. I got the most creative idea there is. Its so simple yet

hallo, i am a newbie to this steemit, best regards for you. Please guide me

My most in-depth thought about SMT: I'm worried an average user (i mean a normal one not the crypto experts here on steemit) can handle 100s of additional currencies. But it will require much more average users then crypto experts to make all of those coins a success. I would instead like to see tools and interfaces to better integrate steem into other communities and other kinds of content. Having each community managing his currency is making things more intransparent and challenging to compare. Comparisons only experts will be able to do. Ask your self what might be better...a huge market for one content based coin or 100s of marginal markets with different content coins.
I can see only a handful of SMT succeed in the long-run.

I agree, the basic "complexity" of the rewards system now keeps many from joining Steemit.

Once more cryptoprojects become mainstream the vast majority will take the complexity as granted. Consider how many normal people are worried about inflation/interest rate/exchange rate relations while using fiat currencies in daily life. But there are indicators they will be worried such as salary or price.

The next group of people getting added will not be worried about the blockchain tech, and the very next may not even be aware of its existence. I wonder how many of us are aware of TCP/IP.

The early adopters can easily become powerful participants of tomorrow's crypto world, while the crypto layman of tomorrow will be aware of only the indicators such as number of votes on posts or the dollar value near it.

If a small business jumps onboard at the beginnings of SMT, how would they then implement it? Even if it's added easily on a Weordpress site, how will that incentivise readers to use them, who can invest and how will we profit from it?

Its not necesarily a profit mechanism, but by creating a market it could be sold for steem. This can only happen if the token has a use-case other than selling, ie buying or subscribing to your product. This probably has to be exclusive with some existing demand, if they can use fiat then they might avoid using the SMT, which would fail to create the market.

OK, gotchya. Thanks :)

With pleasure!

Hi @ned, while I think the concept of SMT and SMT Oracles very interesting (and would like to contribute to the whitepaper), I am not sure that the question: Did the entity behind this account perform action X, or X+Y, or X+Y+N? is so simple, and therefore something that can be incorporated easily into a process for Oracles. Of course, all complex operations can be broken down into simpler steps but then it will also be possible to automate as we have seen time and time again.

I do not have an answer yet but I have been thinking about the issue of bots and looking at data with people from bisteemit to see if there are some clues to help improve the quality of content on the platform, but I look forward to contributing to the whitepaper with an optimistic but cautious view about being able to problems that involve people behaving rationally or logically.

Can't wait for SMT, gonna be so awesome

@ned, By the call for academics, i think you mean people in research and development, either in universities or research centre. If so, i would like to suggest that this is somehow pushed and or published on researchgate.net , since that is where you can get alot of researchers from different part of the world. Also, you will get more external review of the process which will not only help the proposal but steemit at large.

@ned I would be interested in a discussion with you on this. I will be away the next few days but will contact you on chat when I get back

@Ned I had just finished a new Steem-based blockchain whitepaper I'd been working on for months when you came out with the SMT whitepaper, making the mine pretty redundant. While yours is far more all-encompassing, we actually came to a few very similar conclusions! I'm not a very good programmer but I love economics work, and I'd love to share my ideas on what kind of DAPPS become possible with this. I'll try to hit you up on steemit.chat later this weekend.

Keep up the good work, looking forward to the future of Steem and awesome SMT tokens!

Great post

Hi @ned. Just wanted to say that Steemit website is severely lacking in many functions/fixes.
It sucks balls.
Gonna start using busy from today.

  • Written From Busy.org Using Their Awesome Website Which Doesn't Have Infinite Bugs

Oracles are something that those of us just wrapped our heads around the block are still getting used to. What are some good resources for understanding them better (other than the links @ned included?)?

They're a little bit like a notary public, in US Jurisprudence. Sort of. An oracle could even do the same job, if that's what the requirement is for the particular application. "This individual proved their identity and signed this document, stating the document was true."

a high tech ninja notary public. I like it!!!
That is how I will explain them from now on.
XD

Yeah, before I can address @ned's question I need to first know what an Oracle is.

I have worked in, for, with and been scrutinized by Quality Assurance. "Quality Assurance", can be bought, paid, hijacked, and play favoritism, at almost anytime. So without a strong leader willing to look at the work of the QA department, that business will fail, or have major problems. The news is full of failures at the Quality Assurance level.
So I think you will need to have a very very important person who would and could be fired for any failure of the Quality Assurance branch. So a function of the Chief Financial Officer would be the buck stops here person of Quality Assurance.

Quality Assurance is simply publishing a list identifying what the Oracles are getting wrong. It’s a bit like a “missed block” report for DPoS Witnesses. Because it’s a simple job, it should be codifiable and I expect add value in terms of data accuracy.

Oh, completely did not understand that part then. I am still very new to crypto stuff and SMT's have confused me more. I will most like try to avoid this kind of link in the future. But I do love social aspect of steemit, thank you for providing and keeping it running.

participants are voted into Oracle positions by stake-weighted voting of an SMT

There is something I don't understand. If the job of Oracles is to whitelist people into a specific SMT, then how are these people going to vote Oracles in the first place and with what stake/SMT...Hopefully that make sense.

In an SMT, voting rights (granted by stake) over Oracle positions are distinct from rights to receive from the SMTs rewards pool. This means someone could own an SMT and not have rights to receive from that SMT reward pool - similar to how many people own Bitcoin but can’t/don’t mine it themselves.

As for genesis - either some SMT must exist at launch/outset to do the voting for Oracles; there will be no Oracle restrictions on Rewards Pools; or the Oracle electorate are decided by another SMT.

Can each smt adjust their inflation rates based on predicted market size?

I really enjoy this build-your-own subchain SMT idea - I think Ill head over to steem.chat under the 'deep-thinker' category 👈😇👉

When onboarding is instant, what will the incentive be for signing up for a steemit account.. Will there be any free STEEM for signing up still when millions of people are signing up for Steemit?

Yes; beyond becoming part of a network and sharing in the networks value, think of invitations and referrals with rewards sharing.

Que difícil se me hace entender la información que transmite. Me llena de curiosidad e interés los temas por que son más que simples publicaciones. Están tratando temas reales ,buscan soluciones y mejorías. Buscan más y eso es bueno.

SMT is the future, or at least part of it.

How difficult it is for me to understand the information that it transmits. It fills me with curiosity and interest because they are more than mere publications. They are dealing with real issues, seeking solutions and improvements. They look for more and that's good.

Greetings dear founder @ned, I want to be your friend.

This platform doesn't let me stand out for free, it's unfair.

Always great nd hard work for steemians.

Thats why i love steemit community @ned

hello @ned

Do you wonder about the power of Steem? Not just it's monetary value, but as a tool to make change happen? I often think about that and the more I work on steemit, the more I see huge potential. I noticed you have a philanthropic side to you.

I have recently started a very simple project on steemit. It is called 'Upvote a tree', where I donate 100% of SBD to the cause of reforestation here in Northern Peru. I actually plant the native tree saplings myself and I post videos about it on here. I have worked in the field of international development for over 10 years and I have yet to see anything close to what steem can do for the world. The principle of just a simple upvote, no mater the value, means it is participatory and driven by a growing community. I could go on and on about my thoughts and visions, but I know you probably get loads of messages and thank you for reading this far.

Kind regards,

@intrepidsurfer

Can't wait to see how this will develop

That would be great boss. Let's see how it all plays out.

Hope for success.

Great news sir! Thanks for sharing

Sire this a good and Lovely idea cant wait until wen its will be implemented

this is really a good job my friend, success is always for you.

...keep up the great coding(s)

......promo†ed & up√oted via @cnts :]

great creativity.

what does a doughnut have to do with anything :D and why is it being electrocuted :D

Keep This Good Work hope you success in life.

This is interesting, I might need it since I do my research and teach as well for various subjects.

Sure...ofcours

Amazing @ned
Thanks for sharing

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