From Athens to the Blockchain: Oracles for Digital Democracy

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.

Government by Code? Blockchain Applications to Public Sector Governance

“…In addition to blockchain nesting within established or statesponsored governance, blockchains involve governance dilemmas similar to any large organization, including those arising from uncertainty in contractual relations (Howell and Potgieter, 2021) and the necessity of rules to deal with the concentration of power (Alston, 2020), as well as blockchainspecific governance dilemmas, including the need to choose protocols (Cowen, 2019) and competitive dynamics among blockchains (Alston, 2021). There are also governance challenges that arise from reliance on oracles to bring data from the real world into the digital world (Poblet et al, 2020). Oracles are software interfaces trusted by contracting parties to translate real-world data into a form that can be used to determine whether blockchain's conditions are satisfied and are often needed to translate those events into the blockchain (Poblet et al, 2020).…”

“…There are also governance challenges that arise from reliance on oracles to bring data from the real world into the digital world (Poblet et al, 2020). Oracles are software interfaces trusted by contracting parties to translate real-world data into a form that can be used to determine whether blockchain's conditions are satisfied and are often needed to translate those events into the blockchain (Poblet et al, 2020). In addition, while smart contracts are selfexecuting, disputes over smart contracts still are resolved by fleshand-blood lawyers in the context of traditional courts of law (De Filippi et al, 2021).…”

Blockchain Networks as Knowledge Commons

“…Another Ostromian theme is polycentricity of blockchain networks, including the ways in which "external" rules (laws and regulations) influence any given network's performance (Alston et al, 2021), how quality and feature competition enable users to shop across blockchains to find the one(s) that have characteristics most suitable for their preferred transaction(s) (Alston, Forthcoming), the dynamics of entry and exit from blockchains (Berg and Berg 2020), and the ways that disputes are resolved (Howell & Potgieter, 2021). Additional research highlights resolution of disputes on blockchains (Allen, Lane, and Poblet 2019), including conflict arising from reliance on oracles to interface between the real world of data based on human behavior and the algorithmic world of blockchains (Poblet et al, 2020), and the internal dynamics governing choice of protocols to govern blockchain networks (Cowen, 2019).…”

The De-Central Bank in Decentralized Finance: A Case Study of MakerDAO

“…According to Zetzsche et al [39], DeFi may be defined by its incorporation of decentralization, distributed ledgers, smart contacts, disintermediation, and open banking. As such, it stands in contrast to both traditional finance and centralized banking as it could allow for a democratization of finance and monetary policy by broadening the opportunities for access, removing potential gatekeepers, and placing responsibility for policy decisions in the hands of the system's actual users [40,41]. Thereby, DeFi is increasingly relevant for areas such as international development, reserve banking, political governance, and business applications [9,42,43].…”