Something isn't necessarily true just because the majority of people believe it to be true. At one point in history most people believed the world was flat.
Which point in history was that?
;) --- idea is that truth is a schelling point
A Decentralized Lie Detector
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: A Decentralized Lie Detector
#22This doesn't address Sybil attacks. Bitcoin is unique in that it presented the first viable decentralized solution to Sybil attacks (via proof-of-work). To leverage that solution here, it would require that only people who successfully solve the proof-of-work puzzle are able to submit statements to the "decentralized lie detector", otherwise I could just spin up a billion VMs to spread the lies I wanted. The only oth…
Sybil attacks are addressed due to the way reputation works. Reports are a weighted average - so the more reputation you have, the more your votes are weighted. You could make a billion separate accounts and send them each one reputation, but there's no discernible difference than if you had just reported with one account with one billion reputation.
but you can't make more reputation out of thin air by creating new accounts/addresses, just as you can't create Bitcoin by making new addresses
Re: A Decentralized Lie Detector
#23Re: A Decentralized Lie Detector
#24Something isn't necessarily true just because the majority of people believe it to be true. At one point in history most people believed the world was flat.
Something isn't necessarily true just because the majority of people believe it to be true.
I'll add to that. At one point in history in 2014 most people believed that all their ancestors regarded the world as flat.
Re: A Decentralized Lie Detector
#25Something isn't necessarily true just because the majority of people believe it to be true. At one point in history most people believed the world was flat.
This is a very important point, and is something I (unfortunately) glossed over in the blog post:
In Augur, truth equals consensus. As such, the Augur oracle is intended to be used for events which are easily and objectively determinable after the event has occurred. (For example, the winner of an election.)
However, as you correctly point out, there are MANY cases where consensus might not reflect the truth, such as:
- Events where there is ongoing controversy about what happened (e.g., "Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was brought down by terrorists")
- Events where the outcome is subjective (e.g., "was Carter a good President?")
- Events where the outcome is unreasonably difficult to determine (e.g., "what is President Obama's checking account balance?")
These events are NOT good candidates for Augur! In fact, all questions include a "this was a bad question" answer, in case a user is asked to report on an ill-defined or unanswerable event.
Of course, Augur's oracle can dutifully report the consensus in these cases -- and the consensus very often will be "this was a bad question" -- but it's up to you to use your judgment as to whether this consensus is an accurate reflection of the truth.
Re: A Decentralized Lie Detector
#26This doesn't address Sybil attacks. Bitcoin is unique in that it presented the first viable decentralized solution to Sybil attacks (via proof-of-work). To leverage that solution here, it would require that only people who successfully solve the proof-of-work puzzle are able to submit statements to the "decentralized lie detector", otherwise I could just spin up a billion VMs to spread the lies I wanted. The only oth…
I neglected to introduce the Reputation concept in the blog post. As joeykrug said, Reputation is needed to report on events, and your report is weighted by the number of Reputation tokens you have. So you can't sybil attack simply by splitting your tokens across multiple accounts, as this wouldn't amplify your reports in any way.
The other key point is that Reputation holders are not able to report on events as often as they want to. Instead, they only can report on events at fixed, pre-defined intervals. This precludes sybil attacks by simply report-spamming the network.
Re: A Decentralized Lie Detector
#27This doesn't address Sybil attacks. Bitcoin is unique in that it presented the first viable decentralized solution to Sybil attacks (via proof-of-work). To leverage that solution here, it would require that only people who successfully solve the proof-of-work puzzle are able to submit statements to the "decentralized lie detector", otherwise I could just spin up a billion VMs to spread the lies I wanted. The only oth…
What, specifically, is cool to you about the math?
Why, the tensors, of course!